The Araucaria Project. The Distance to the Local Group Galaxy WLM from Near-Infrared Photometry of Cepheid Variables

Details The Araucaria Project. The Distance to the Local Group Galaxy WLM from Near-Infrared Photometry of Cepheid Variables The Araucaria Project. The Distance to the Local Group Galaxy WLM from Near-Infrared Photometry of Cepheid Variables

2008-05-17

arxiv.org/abs/0805.2655v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

latex, 6 figures. accepted to ApJ

Scientific paper

10.1086/589994

We have obtained deep images in the near-infrared J and K filters for several fields in the Local Group galaxy WLM. We report intensity mean magnitudes for 31 Cepheids located in these fields which we previously discovered in a wide-field optical imaging survey of WLM. The data define tight period-luminosity relations in both near-infrared bands which we use to derive the total reddening of the Cepheids in WLM and the true distance modulus of the galaxy from a multiwavelength analysis of the reddened distance moduli in the VIJK bands. From this, we obtain the values E(B-V) = 0.082 $\pm$ 0.02, and $(m-M)_{0} = 24.924 \pm 0.042$ mag, with a systematic uncertainty in the distance of about $\pm$ 3%. This Cepheid distance agrees extremely well with the distance of WLM determined from the I-band TRGB method by ourselves and others. Most of the reddening of the Cepheids in WLM (0.06 mag) is produced inside the galaxy, demonstrating again the need for an accurate determination of the total reddening and/or the use of infrared photometry to derive Cepheid distances which are accurate to 3% or better, even for small irregular galaxies like WLM.

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