The Cepheid Period-Luminosity Relationship at 12 microns

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

We have made the first calibration of the period-luminosity relationship for classical Cepheids at a wavelength of 12 microns using IRAS data. The scatter in the 12 micron calibration is comparable to and only slightly larger than the scatter in the best available time-averaged V band calibration. This is in spite of the fact that the V data has been corrected for interstellar extinction and integrated over their brightness variations with phase, while the 12 micron data is only a simple mean of a few observations obtained randomly by the satellite. This confirms and extends the suggestion previously made by Madore and Freedman (1991) and others that random phase observations may successfully be used and that corrections for interstellar extinction become progressively unimportant for the Cepheid distance scale as one moves further into the infrared. We identify the main limitation at 12 microns to be contamination by infrared cirrus. From a sample of 23 Cepheids selected from around the Galactic plane, 4 objects (17%) show probable cirrus contamination at a significant level. We are now exploring the potential applications of this calibration to the study of Galactic structure, stellar evolution, and perhaps even the local extragalactic distance scale. This work was supported by the NASA Astrophysics Data Program grant NAG 5-1621. Madore, B. and Freedman, W. (1991) PASP, 103, 933

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