Calibration of the Distance Scale from Cepheids.pdfVIP

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 0 3 0 1 2 9 1 v 1 1 5 J a n 2 0 0 3 Calibration of the Distance Scale from Cepheids Pascal Fouque?1,2, Jesper Storm3, and Wolfgang Gieren4 1 Observatoire de Paris, LESIA, 5, place Jules Janssen, F-92195 Meudon Cedex, France 2 European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile 3 Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, D-14482 Potsdam, Germany 4 Astronomy Group, Departamento de F??sica, Facultad de Ciencias F??sicas y Matema?ticas, Universidad de Concepcio?n, Casilla 160-C, Concepcio?n, Chile 1 Introduction Since the discovery by Ms. Leavitt almost a hundred years ago that Cepheid vari- ables obey a tight relationship between their pulsation periods and absolute mag- nitudes, astronomers have made great efforts to calibrate this relationship, and use it to estimate the distances to nearby galaxies in which Cepheids were found. For a very nice review of the early history of the Cepheid period-luminosity (PL) relation, see Fernie ([17]). With the course of time, the calibration of the PL re- lation was refined, using new methods and improving data for both Cepheids in our own Galaxy and Cepheids which were found in increasing numbers in Local Group galaxies. In particular, the Magellanic Clouds have played a fundamen- tal role in our effort to calibrate the PL relation (and still do so today, as we will show in this review), mainly because they are just near enough to make Cepheid apparent magnitudes bright enough for accurate photometry with even small telescopes, and on the other hand distant enough to have them, in a good approximation, all at the same distance. The slope of the PL relations can thus be determined directly from a sample of LMC Cepheids in contrast to a sample of Galactic Cepheids where accurate individual distances, which are fundamen- tally difficult to determine, are needed. In the course of the decades, it became clear that the Cepheid PL relation is a very powerful method to det