J/ApJ/951/118 PHATTER M33 Cepheids HST phot. & distances (Breuval+, 2023)
A 1.3% distance to M33 from Hubble Space Telescope Cepheid photometry.
Breuval L., Riess A.G., Macri L.M., Li S., Yuan W., Casertano S.,
Konchady T., Trahin B., Durbin M.J., Williams B.F.
<Astrophys. J., 951, 118 (2023)>
=2023ApJ...951..118B 2023ApJ...951..118B
ADC_Keywords: Stars, variable; Photometry, HST; Stars, distances; Magnitudes;
Optical; Infrared; Surveys
Keywords: Cepheid distance ; Hubble constant ; HST photometry ; Galaxy distances
Abstract:
We present a low-dispersion period-luminosity relation (PL) based on
154 Cepheids in Messier 33 (M33) with Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
photometry from the PHATTER survey. Using high-quality ground-based
light curves, we recover Cepheid phases and amplitudes for multi-epoch
HST data and we perform template fitting to derive intensity-averaged
mean magnitudes. HST observations in the SH0ES near-infrared Wesenheit
system significantly reduce the effect of crowding relative to
ground-based data, as seen in the final PL scatter of σ=0.11mag.
We adopt the absolute calibration of the PL based on HST observations
in the Large Magellanic Cloud and a distance derived using late-type
detached eclipsing binaries to obtain a distance modulus for M33 of
µ=24.622±0.030mag (d=840±11kpc), a best-to-date precision of
1.3%. We find very good agreement with past Cepheid-based
measurements. Several tip of the red giant branch estimates bracket
our result while disagreeing with each other. Finally, we show that
the flux contribution from star clusters hosting Cepheids in M33 does
not impact the distance measurement and we find only ∼3.7% of the
sample is located in (or nearby) young clusters. M33 offers one of the
best sites for the cross-calibration of many primary distance
indicators. Thus, a precise independent geometric determination of its
distance would provide a valuable new anchor to measure the Hubble
constant.
Description:
We used a template sample of 609 previously known Cepheids
(Macri+ 2001, J/AJ/121/870; Pellerin & Macri 2011, J/ApJS/193/26) with
homogeneous gri light curves obtained by T. Konchady+ (2023, in
preparation) using archival Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope
(CFHT)/MegaCam observations (proposal ID 04BF26, PI: Beaulieu;
proposal ID 04BH98, PI: Hodapp). The majority of the original CFHT
observations (associated with proposal ID 04BF26) are extensively
described in Hartman+ (2006, J/MNRAS/371/1405); they span roughly
1.5yr (2003 August to 2005 January) and were obtained on 27 separate
nights.
We supplemented these with an additional four nights of i observations
obtained in 2004 August and September (associated with propID 04HB98).
The PHATTER survey (Williams+ 2021, J/ApJS/253/53) contains
photometric measurements for 22 million stars in M33 with six UV to
NIR filters (Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3) on
the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The observations were taken between
2017 February 21 and 2018 February 25.
We identified 250 Cepheids from the template sample in the PHATTER
catalog.
This HST sample was observed in different filters from ground-based
data. See Section 3.
File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
table9.dat 100 154 *Full sample of HST M33 Cepheids used in this
analysis and their mean magnitudes obtained from
template fitting
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Note on table9.dat: The values here do not include subtraction of 0.015mag
to correct count-rate nonlinearity (CRNL; see Section 4.2) for 2dex
between LMC and M33 Cepheids and they do not include addition of
0.069mag to mWH errors for intrinsic scatter.
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See also:
J/AJ/121/870 : BVI photometry of Variables in M33 (Macri+, 2001)
J/AJ/128/224 : VI photometry in M33 outer regions (Tiede+, 2004)
J/ApJ/652/313 : BV phot. of a detached EB in M 33 (Bonanos+, 2006)
J/MNRAS/371/1405 : Variables in M33 (Hartman+, 2006)
J/AJ/131/2478 : M31 and M33 UBVRI photometry (Massey+, 2006)
J/AJ/132/1361 : RR Lyrae variables in M33 (Sarajedini+, 2006)
J/AJ/134/447 : Star cluster candidates in M 33 (Sarajedini+, 2007)
J/ApJ/696/729 : Fluxes and abundances of PNe in M33 (Magrini+, 2009)
J/ApJ/699/539 : Cepheids in SN-Ia host galaxies (Riess+, 2009)
J/ApJS/193/26 : The M33 synoptic stellar survey. I. (Pellerin+, 2011)
J/ApJ/758/11 : Bayesian distances to M31 satellites (Conn+, 2012)
J/ApJ/759/146 : Spitzer/IRAC phot. for 37 Galactic Cepheids (Monson+, 2012)
J/ApJ/745/156 : M31 Cepheids with HST/WFC3 (Riess+, 2012)
J/A+A/576/A30 : NIR LC templates for classical Cepheids (Inno+, 2015)
J/MNRAS/451/724 : PHAT. XIII. M31 Cepheid P-L relation (Wagner-Kaiser+, 2015)
J/AJ/151/88 : LMC NIR Synoptic Survey. II. (Bhardwaj+, 2016)
J/ApJ/864/59 : M31 PAndromeda Cepheids in four HST bands (Kodric+, 2018)
J/AJ/156/112 : NIR Mira period-luminosity relations in M33 (Yuan+, 2018)
J/ApJ/876/85 : HST observations for LMC Cepheids (Riess+, 2019)
J/ApJ/904/13 : RVel for 10 giant eclipsing binaries (Graczyk+, 2020)
J/ApJ/902/145 : Cosmicflows-4: Tully-Fisher distances (Kourkchi+, 2020)
J/ApJ/902/26 : HST opt. & H-band obs. of Cepheids in NGC4151 (Yuan+, 2020)
J/ApJ/913/38 : Compilation of Cepheids in the MW and MCs (Breuval+, 2021)
J/ApJ/920/84 : HST photometry of 55 cepheids in M31 (Li+, 2021)
J/ApJS/253/53 : PHATTER. I. 22 million stars in M33 (Williams+, 2021)
J/ApJ/938/81 : PHATTER. IV. Star cluster catalog (Johnson+, 2022)
J/ApJ/939/44 : CHAOS. VII. Large-scale abundances in M33 (Rogers+, 2022)
J/A+A/658/A29 : LMC classical Cepheids Fe and O content (Romaniello+, 2022)
J/AJ/165/137 : Light curve and observed properties in M33 (Ou+, 2023)
Byte-by-byte Description of file: table9.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 16 A16 --- ID Cepheid identifier (HHMMSSss+DDMMSSs)
18 A1 --- f_ID [*] *: a cluster Cepheids in Section 5
20- 27 F8.5 deg RAdeg [23.3/23.7] Right Ascension (J2000)
29- 36 F8.5 deg DEdeg [30.4/30.9] Declination (J2000)
38- 42 F5.3 [d] logP [0.53/1.9] Log period
44- 49 F6.3 mag F160Wmag [16.19/20.5] Apparent HST/WFC3 F160W band
magnitude
51- 53 I3 mmag e_F160Wmag [12/294] Uncertainty in F160Wmag
55- 60 F6.3 mag F475Wmag [19.16/22.7] Apparent HST F475W band
magnitude
62- 64 I3 mmag e_F475Wmag [4/634] Uncertainty in F475Wmag
66- 71 F6.3 mag F814Wmag [17.74/21.53] Apparent HST F814W band
magnitude
73- 75 I3 mmag e_F814Wmag [2/358] Uncertainty in F814Wmag
77- 82 F6.3 mag mWH [15.64/20.2] NIR HST/WFC3 Wesenheit index (1)
84- 86 I3 mmag e_mWH [21/300] Uncertainty in mWH
88- 91 F4.2 kpc dGC [0.43/5.43] Deprojected galactocentric
distance
93- 98 F6.3 mag DelCor [-0.005/0.008] Geometric correction
100 A1 --- Set Sample identifier; (G)old or (S)ilver
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Note (1): We adopt the NIR HST/WFC3 Wesenheit index defined in
Riess+ (2022ApJ...934L...7R 2022ApJ...934L...7R), assuming the reddening law from
Fitzpatrick (1999PASP..111...63F 1999PASP..111...63F) with reddening parameter RV=3.3:
mHW=F160W-0.386(F555W-F814W)WFC3 (see Equation 9 in Section 4.1)
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History:
From electronic version of the journal
(End) Prepared by [AAS], Emmanuelle Perret [CDS] 21-Aug-2025