J/ApJS/278/57 Milky Way as seen by classical Cepheids. I. WISE (Skowron+, 2025)
The Milky Way as seen by classical Cepheids.
I. Distances based on mid-infrared photometry.
Skowron D.M., Drimmel R., Khanna S., Spagna A., Poggio E., Ramos P.
<Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser., 278, 57 (2025)>
=2025ApJS..278...57S 2025ApJS..278...57S
ADC_Keywords: Stars, variable; Photometry, infrared; Stars, distances;
Extinction; Stars, ages; Optical; Milky Way
Keywords: Cepheid distance ; Standard candles ; Distance indicators ;
Galaxy structure ; Milky Way disk
Abstract:
Classical Cepheids are the archetype of the standard candle, thanks to
the period-luminosity relation, which allows us to measure their
intrinsic brightness. They are also relatively young and bright,
potentially making them excellent tracers of the young stellar
population that is responsible for shaping the visible aspect of our
Galaxy. However, being observers embedded in the dusty interstellar
medium of the Galaxy, deriving reliable photometric distances to
classical Cepheids of the Milky Way is a challenge. The typical
approach is to use "reddening-free" indices, such as Wesenheit
magnitudes, to obviate the need for an extinction correction. However,
this approach could lead to unknown systematics-especially toward the
inner Galaxy-as its assumption of a universal total-to-selective
extinction ratio is not satisfied, particularly in lines of sight
where the extinction is high and crosses spiral arms. We instead
estimate new distances for 3424 Cepheids based on mid-IR photometry
from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which suffers minimally
from extinction, and by adopting a 3D extinction map to calculate the
necessary (albeit small) extinction corrections. We show that our
distances are consistent with Gaia's parallaxes for the subset with
relative parallax errors smaller than 10%, verifying that our mean
distance errors are of the order of 6% and that the mean parallax
zero-point for this subsample is 7µas.
Description:
We use the list of P21 (Pietrukowicz+ 2021AcA....71..205P 2021AcA....71..205P;
http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/ogle/ogle4/OCVS/allGalCep.listID) as a
source of classical Cepheid coordinates, periods, and modes of
pulsation. We used the version of the table from 2023 September,
already updated with classical Cepheids from Gaia DR3.
We crossmatched our list of classical Cepheids with the AllWISE (II/328)
and unWISE (II/363) catalogs using a 1" search radius.
See Section 2.2 for further explanations.
File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
table1.dat 219 3424 Cepheid distance catalog
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See also:
B/gcvs : General Catalogue of Variable Stars (Samus+, 2007-2017)
B/corot : CoRoT observation log (N2-4.4) (CoRoT 2016)
II/273 : MISAO new variable stars (Yoshida+, 1999-2000)
II/264 : ASAS Variable Stars in Southern hemisphere (Pojmanski+, 2002-2005)
II/287 : Northern Sky Variability Survey (NSVS) (Wozniak+, 2004)
II/311 : WISE All-Sky Data Release (Cutri+ 2012)
II/328 : AllWISE Data Release (Cutri+ 2013)
I/345 : Gaia DR2 (Gaia Collaboration, 2018)
II/363 : The band-merged unWISE Catalog (Schlafly+, 2019)
II/366 : ASAS-SN catalog of variable stars (Jayasinghe+, 2018-2020)
II/365 : The CatWISE2020 catalog (updated version 28-Jan-2021) (Marocco+, 2021)
V/155 : GDR2AP. Gaia DR2, 2MASS, AllWISE astrophys. param. (Fouesneau+, 2022)
I/355 : Gaia DR3 Part 1. Main source (Gaia Collaboration, 2022)
I/358 : Gaia DR3 Part 4. Variability (Gaia Collaboration, 2022)
II/376 : VISTA Variable in the Via Lactea Survey (VVV) DR4.2 (Minniti+, 2023)
II/390 : EROS light curve data base (EROS coll., 2025)
J/AcA/51/221 : OGLE-II. Cepheids in IC 1613 (Udalski+, 2001)
J/A+A/453/635 : Modelling the Gal. Interstellar Extinction (Marshall+, 2006)
J/ApJ/663/320 : IR-through-UV extinction curve (Fitzpatrick+, 2007)
J/AJ/137/4598 : VR light curve of ASAS-North Cepheids (Schmidt+, 2009)
J/ApJ/713/615 : Very metal-poor Cepheid models (Marconi+, 2010)
J/AcA/61/285 : VI LCs of Galactic Bulge Cepheids (Soszynski+, 2011)
J/ApJ/743/76 : Spitzer photometry of LMC Cepheids (Scowcroft+, 2011)
J/ApJ/759/146 : Spitzer/IRAC phot. for 37 Galactic Cepheids (Monson+, 2012)
J/A+A/550/A70 : Gal. & Magellanic Cloud Cepheids distance (Groenewegen 2013)
J/A+A/566/A37 : Iron abundances for 42 Galactic Cepheids (Genovali+, 2014)
J/AcA/67/297 : OGLE Gal. center Cepheids and RR Lyrae (Soszynski+, 2017)
J/A+A/620/A99 : SMC Cepheids K-band and RV curves (Gieren+, 2018)
J/A+A/619/A8 : Cepheid period-lum-metallicity relation (Groenewegen, 2018)
J/AJ/156/241 : Catalog of variable stars measured by ATLAS (Heinze+, 2018)
J/A+A/613/A9 : Extinction towards Galactic O stars (Maiz Apellaniz+, 2018)
J/AcA/68/315 : OGLE Galactic Cepheids (Udalski+, 2018)
J/ApJ/852/78 : JHKs, WISE & Spitzer data of Galactic Cepheids (Wang+, 2018)
J/ApJ/885/131 : High-mass SFR plx & proper motion with VLBI (Reid+, 2019)
J/other/Sci/365.478 : Milky Way classical Cepheids sample (Skowron+, 2019)
J/AcA/69/305 : Northern Galactic disk classical Cepheids (Skowron+, 2019)
J/ApJS/249/18 : The ZTF catalog of periodic variable stars (Chen+, 2020)
J/AcA/70/101 : OGLE IV Galactic Cepheids (Soszynski+, 2020)
J/ApJ/914/127 : Gaia-ASAS-SN classical Cepheid sample. I. (Inno+, 2021)
J/A+A/651/A104 : Spiral arms Gaia EDR3 (Poggio+, 2021)
J/MNRAS/508/4047 : Classical Cepheids HARPSN@TNG spectroscopy (Ripepi+, 2021)
J/A+A/659/A167 : Cepheid Period-Wesenheit-Metallicities (Ripepi+, 2022)
J/A+A/672/A85 : Galactic Cepheid luminosity scale (Cruz Reyes+, 2023)
J/A+A/674/A17 : Gaia Data Release 3. The Cepheids sample (Ripepi+, 2023)
J/A+A/683/A234 : Cepheid Metallicity in Leavitt Law Survey (Bhardwaj+, 2024)
J/A+A/681/A65 : Cepheids PL relation metallicity dependence (Trentin+, 2024)
Byte-by-byte Description of file: table1.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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1- 11 A11 --- Cat Source catalog as reported by P21
(Pietrukowicz+ 2021AcA....71..205P 2021AcA....71..205P)
(survey_source) (1)
13- 31 A19 --- ID Source ID in the source catalog
(surveysourceid)
33- 51 I19 --- GaiaDR3 Gaia source ID (gaia_id)
53- 62 F10.6 deg GLON Galactic longitude (glon)
64- 73 F10.6 deg GLAT [-32.8/24.4] Galactic latitude (glat)
75- 80 A6 --- Mode Mode of variability from P21 (mode)
82- 92 F11.8 d Period [0.26/68.7] Fundamentalized period of
variability from P21
(Pietrukowicz+ 2021AcA....71..205P 2021AcA....71..205P) (period)
94- 99 F6.3 mag W1magAll [0/15.1] Apparent W1 magnitude from AllWISE
after corrections (w1_all)
101- 106 F6.3 mag muAll [0/20] Distance modulus based on AllWISE
(mu_all)
108- 112 F5.3 mag e_muAll [0/0.6] Uncertainty in muAll (emuall)
114- 118 I5 pc DistAll [0/98815] Distance based on AllWISE (d-all)
120- 123 I4 pc e_DistAll [0/4429] Uncertainty in DistAll (d-all)
125- 129 F5.3 mag Aw1All [0/1.1] Extinction in W1 from AllWISE (a_all)
131- 136 F6.3 mag W1magUn [0/15.6] Apparent W1 magnitude from unWISE
(w1_un)
138- 143 F6.3 mag muUn [0/21.3] Distance modulus based on unWISE
(mu_un)
145- 149 F5.3 mag e_muUn [0/0.12] Uncertainty in muUn (emuun)
151- 156 I6 pc DistUn [0/180882] Distance based on unWISE (d_un)
158- 161 I4 pc e_DistUn [0/7147] Uncertainty in DistUn (edun)
163- 167 F5.3 mag Aw1Un [0/1.21] Extinction in W1 from unWISE (a_un)
169- 174 F6.3 mag W1mag [0.3/15.6] Apparent W1 magnitude averaged
over AllWISE and unWISE (w1_av)
176- 181 F6.3 mag mu [5.67/21.3] Distance modulus based on
averaged W1 (mu_av)
183- 187 F5.3 mag e_mu [0.08/0.6] Uncertainty in mu (emuav)
189- 194 I6 pc Dist [136/180882] Distance based on averaged W1
(d_av)
196- 199 I4 pc e_Dist [6/7147] Uncertainty in Dist (edav)
201- 205 F5.3 mag Aw1 [0/1.21] Extinction in W1 based on averaged
W1 (a_av)
207- 210 I4 Myr Age [14/1243] Age estimate (age)
212- 219 F8.3 --- Q [0/42.6]?=9999 Quality indicator
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Note (1): Catalogue as follows:
OGLE-IV = Classical Cepheids in the Milky Way from P21
(Pietrukowicz+ 2021AcA....71..205P 2021AcA....71..205P;
https://www.astrouw.edu.pl/ogle/ogle4/OCVS/allGalCep.listID;
1463 occurrences)
GCVS = the General Catalog of Variable Stars
(Samus+ 2017ARep...61...80S 2017ARep...61...80S; 734 occurrences -- B/gcvs)
ZTF-DR 2 = the Zwicky Transient Facility DR2 (416 occurrences)
Gaia-DR3 = Gaia DR3, see I/355 and I/358 (282 occurrences)
ASASSN-V = the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, see II/366
(170 occurrences)
ATLAS = the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System;
Heinze+ 2018, J/AJ/156/241 (139 occurrences)
ASAS = See II/264 (109 occurrences)
NSVS = 40 occurrences (see II/287)
VVV = 18 occurrences (see II/376)
OGLE-III = 15 occurrences (see Soszynski+, 2011, J/AcA/61/285)
WISE = Chen+ 2018, J/ApJS/237/28 (12 occurrences)
Gaia-DR2 = 5 occurrences (see I/345)
EROS2-GSA = 4 occurrences
OGLE-II = 3 occurrences
BEST = See Kabath+ 2008, J/AJ/136/654 & 2009, J/AJ/137/3911
(2 occurrences)
CSS = Drake+ 2014, J/ApJS/213/9 (2 occurrences)
IRSF/SIRIUS = 2 occurrences
MISAO = MISAO project; Yoshida+ 2012,
http://www.aerith.net/misao/data/misv.cgi?1348 (2 occurrences;
see II/273)
Clark+2015 = Clark 2015A&A...584L..12C 2015A&A...584L..12C (1 occurrence)
CoRoT = Poretti et al. 2015MNRAS.454..849P 2015MNRAS.454..849P (1 occurrence)
Dauban = Dauban survey, Caron & Kugel, F. 2013;
http://www.aspylib.com/newsurvey/ (1 occurrence)
Turner+2009 = 2009AAS...21343306T (1 occurrence)
1SWASP = 1 occurrence
2MASS = Quillen et al. 2014MNRAS.441.2691Q 2014MNRAS.441.2691Q (1 occurrence)
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History:
From electronic version of the journal
References:
Drimmel et al. Paper II. 2025A&A...698A.230D 2025A&A...698A.230D
(End) Prepared by [AAS], Emmanuelle Perret [CDS] 19-Feb-2026