Related papers: Using Galactic Cepheids to verify Gaia parallaxes
Stellar distances constitute a foundational pillar of astrophysics. The publication of 1.47 billion stellar parallaxes from Gaia is a major contribution to this. Yet despite Gaia's precision, the majority of these stars are so distant or…
Gaia measures the five astrometric parameters for stars in the Milky Way, but only four of them (positions and proper motion, but not parallax) are well measured beyond a few kpc from the Sun. Modern spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE…
We derive Bayesian distances for all stars in the RV sample of Gaia DR2, and use the statistical method of Schoenrich, Binney & Asplund(2012) to validate the distances and test the Gaia parallaxes. In contrast to other methods, which rely…
With contemporary infrared spectroscopic surveys like APOGEE, red-giant stars can be observed to distances and extinctions at which Gaia parallaxes are not highly informative. Yet the combination of effective temperature, surface gravity,…
We examine the multi-wavelength period-luminosity-color relations for Cepheid variables in the Large and Small magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way. From first-principles stellar physics, the luminosity of a Cepheid is determined by its…
Astrometric surveys such as Gaia and LSST will measure parallaxes for hundreds of millions of stars. Yet they will not measure a single distance. Rather, a distance must be estimated from a parallax. In this didactic article, I show that…
On the basis of recently computed nonlinear convective pulsation models of Galactic Cepheids, spanning wide ranges of input stellar parameters, we derive theoretical mass-dependent Period-Wesenheit relations in the Gaia bands, namely $G$,…
By comparing Cepheid brightnesses with geometric distance measures including Gaia EDR3 parallaxes, most recent analyses conclude metal-rich Cepheids are brighter, quantified as $\gamma \sim -0.2$ mag/dex. While the value of $\gamma$ has…
Gaia will provide parallaxes and proper motions with accuracy ranging from 10 to 1000 microarcsecond on up to one billion stars. Most of these will be disk stars: for an unreddened K giant at 6 kpc, it will measure the distance accurate to…
The importance of studying the Gaia DR2 parallax zero-point by external means was underlined by Lindegren et al. (2018), and initiated by several works making use of Cepheids, eclipsing binaries, and asteroseismology. Despite a very…
As primary anchors of the distance scale, Cepheid stars play a crucial role in our understanding of the distance scale of the Universe because of their period-luminosity relation. Determining precise and consistent parameters (radius,…
An analysis of the observed characteristics of the Galactic Cepheid variables is carried out in the framework of their period-luminosity relation being used as a standard candle for distance measurement. The variation of the observed number…
Classical Cepheids are the archetype of the standard candle, thanks to the period-luminosity relation which allows to measure their intrinsic brightness. They are also relatively young and bright, potentially making them excellent tracers…
Cepheids are key distance indicators and benchmarks for stellar evolution, yet most of them are members of binary or multiple systems. While spectroscopic surveys and Gaia proper-motion anomalies reveal a high binary fraction, the…
The ESA Gaia mission provides a unique time-domain survey for more than one billion sources brighter than G=20.7 mag. Gaia offers the unprecedented opportunity to study variability phenomena in the Universe thanks to multi-epoch G-magnitude…
The advent of high-precision Gaia parallaxes for Milky Way Cepheids enables per cent-level calibration of the local distance ladder and $H_0$. We revisit the Milky Way Cepheid calibration from Gaia EDR3 parallaxes using a fully…
We have studied the zero-point offset of Gaia early Data Release 3 (EDR3) parallaxes based on a sample of 0.3 million giant stars built from the LAMOST data with distance accuracy better than 8.5\%. The official parallax zero-point…
We use parallax data from the Gaia second data release (GDR2), combined with parallax data based on Hipparcos and HST data, to derive the period-luminosity-metallicity (PLZ) relation for Galactic classical cepheids (CCs) in the V,K, and…
Parallaxes measured by the Gaia mission have huge significance for astronomy, but parallaxes in Gaia DR2 are known to have systematic errors that depend on the source position and other quantities. We use the abundant information in faint…
Classical Cepheids (CCs) are at the heart of the empirical extragalactic distance ladder. Milky Way CCs are the only stars of this class accessible to trigonometric parallax measurements. Until recently, the most accurate trigonometric…