Calibration of the distance scale from galactic Cepheids

Free access article

Issue		A&A Volume 389, Number 1, July I 2002


Page(s)		19 - 28
Section		Extragalactic astronomy
DOI		http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361:20020492

A&A 389, 19-28 (2002)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20020492

II. Use of the HIPPARCOS calibration

G. Paturel¹, P. Teerikorpi², G. Theureau³, P. Fouqué⁴, I. Musella⁵ and J. N. Terry¹

¹ CRAL-Observatoire de Lyon, avenue Charles-André, 69561 Saint-Genis Laval Cedex, France
² Turku University Observatory, Tuorla, SF 21500 Piikkio, Finland
³ Laboratoire de Physique et de Chimie de l'Environnement, 3A avenue de la Recherche scientifique, 45071 Orleans Cedex 02, France
⁴ European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, 19 Santiago, Chile
⁵ Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, via Moiariello 16, 80131 Napoli, Italy

(Received 8 August 2001 / Accepted 1 March 2002 )

Abstract
New estimates of the distances of 36 nearby galaxies is presented. These are based on the calibration of the V- and I-band Period-Luminosity relations for galactic Cepheids measured by the HIPPARCOS mission. The distance moduli are obtained in a classical way. The statistical bias due to the incompleteness of the sample is corrected according to the precepts introduced by Teerikorpi (1987). We adopt a constant slope (the one obtained with LMC Cepheids). The correction for incompleteness bias introduces an uncertainty that depends on each galaxy. On average, this uncertainty is small (0.04 mag) but it may reach 0.3 mag. We show that the uncertainty due to the correction of the extinction is small (propably less than 0.05 mag). The correlation between the metallicity and the morphological type of the host galaxy suggests that we should reduce the application to spiral galaxies in order to bypass the problem of metallicity. We suspect that the adopted PL slopes are not valid for all morphological types of galaxies. This may induce a mean systematic shift of 0.1 mag on distance moduli. A comparison with the distance moduli recently published by Freedman et al. (2001) shows there is a reasonably good agreement with our distance moduli.

Key words: galaxies: distances and redshift -- galaxies: stellar content -- cosmology: distance scale

Offprint request: G. Paturel, patu@obs.univ-lyon1.fr

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