The Araucaria Project. The distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud from late-type eclipsing binaries
Abstract
We present a distance determination to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) based on an analysis of four detached, long period, late type eclipsing binaries discovered by the OGLE Survey. The components of the binaries show negligible intrinsic variability. A consistent set of stellar parameters was derived with low statistical and systematic uncertainty. The absolute dimensions of the stars are calculated with a precision of better than 3%. The surface brightness - infrared color relation was used to derive the distance to each binary. The four systems clump around a distance modulus of (m - M)=18.99 with a dispersion of only 0.05 mag. Combining these results with the distance published by Graczyk et al. for the eclipsing binary OGLE SMC113.3 4007 we obtain a mean distance modulus to the SMC of 18.965 +/- 0.025 (stat.) +/- 0.048 (syst.) mag. This corresponds to a distance of 62.1 +/- 1.9 kpc, where the error includes both uncertainties. Taking into account other recent published determinations of the SMC distance we calculated the distance modulus difference between the SMC and the LMC equal to 0.458 +/- 0.068 mag. Finally we advocate mu_{SMC}=18.95 +/- 0.07 as a new "canonical" value of the distance modulus to this galaxy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1311.2340,
title = {The Araucaria Project. The distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud from late-type eclipsing binaries},
author = {Dariusz Graczyk and Grzegorz Pietrzynski and Ian B. Thompson and Wolfgang Gieren and Bogumił Pilecki and Piotr Konorski and Andrzej Udalski and Igor Soszynski and Sandro Villanova and Marek Górski and Ksenia Suchomska and Paulina Karczmarek and Rolf-Peter Kudritzki and Fabio Bresolin and Alexandre Gallenne},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.2340},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in ApJ