Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
1998-12-18
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Invited review to appear in "Harmonizing Cosmic Distance Scales in a Post Hipparcos Era", eds Egret and Heck. 18 pages
Scientific paper
Thanks to HST, there are now many galaxies with Cepheid distances and these provide the main platform for the calibration of the secondary distance indicators. I review recent progress in our understanding of the standard candle properties of Cepheids with particular emphasis on the techniques used in the HST studies. The PL relation defined by Cepheids in the LMC is shown to be excellent, although the distance to the LMC, which determines the zero-point, is still rather controversial. This LMC relation is consistent with the galactic calibrations which use Hipparcos parallaxes or Baade-Wesselink distances. However, the PL plot for Cepheids observed in galactic open-clusters is suggestive of an age dependence of the main-sequence fitting distances, similar to that seen for clusters with Hipparcos parallax distances. Observational and theoretical studies suggest that the metallicity dependence of Cepheid properties is not large, but is sufficiently important that it should be accounted for. However, the fact that target galaxies are typically of similar metallicities to the calibrators, suggest that metallicity corrections won't have a major impact on estimates of the Hubble constant. Incompleteness biases can also affect Cepheid samples, but are usually best dealt with by imposing a conservative lower limit on period.
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