Observatoire de Paris Institut national de recherche scientifique français Univerité Pierre et Marie Curie Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7

Improving the accuracy of the Cepheid method to determine the Hubble constant : A precision distance to the LMC

vendredi 17 mai 2013, par Wolfgang Gieren (Universidad de Concepcion, Chile)

Jeudi 27 juin 2013 à 11h00 , Lieu : Salle de confĂ©rence du bât. 17

I will briefly discuss the basic uncertainties affecting  the Cepheid method to set up the cosmic distance scale, and  derive the Hubble constant. I will then report on the work  of our group to improve on one crucial aspect of the Cepheid  method, which is to determine an accurate distance to the  Large Magellanic Cloud as the best-suited fiducial galaxy  to measure Cepheid distances to more distant galaxies, using  a unique sample of late-type eclipsing binary systems in the  LMC.

 I will also report on an independent determination of the LMC  distance from an application of the infrared surface  brightness technique on LMC Cepheids, which yields a check  on the distance result from the eclipsing binaries.