Related papers: A new calibration for the Blue Horizontal Branch
The surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) method measures the variance in a galaxy's light distribution arising from fluctuations in the numbers and luminosities of individual stars per resolution element. Once calibrated for stellar…
Although Blue Horizontal Branch (BHB) stars are commonly used to trace halo substructure, the stars bluer than (g-r)<-0.3 are ignored due to the difficulty in determining their absolute magnitudes. The blue extention of the horizontal…
We present new calibrations of the near-infrared surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distance method for the F110W (J) and F160W (H) bandpasses of the Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared Channel (WFC3/IR) on the Hubble Space Telescope. The…
We report the mean metallicity and absolute magnitude of RR Lyrae stars in a sample of 37 globular clusters, calculated via the Fourier decomposition of their light curves and ad hoc semiempirical calibrations, in an unprecedented…
Horizontal-branch stars play an important role in defining the absolute distance scale in the universe. For that one has to know Mv at relevant B-V with well defined [M/H] for each type of horizontal-branch star. The nature of the…
The extragalactic distance scale is fundamental to our understanding of astrophysics and cosmology. In recent years, the surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) method, applied in the near-IR, has proven especially powerful for measuring…
We increase the number of remote halo tracers by using blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars out to Galactocentric distances of 130 kpc. We use SDSS EDR photometry and the VLT to detect 16 BHB stars at Galactocentric distances 70 < r < 130,…
Traditional photometric redshift methods use only color information about the objects in question to estimate their redshifts. This paper introduces a new method utilizing colors, luminosity, surface brightness, and radial light profile to…
We investigate the predicted Color-Magnitude distribution of metal-rich Horizontal Branch (HB) stars, discussing selected theoretical models computed under various assumptions about the star metallicity and the efficiency of super-adiabatic…
To measure precise distances beyond the Magellanic Clouds and determine an accurate value of the Hubble constant, eclipsing binary systems composed of early-type stars can play a crucial role. However, it is fundamental to first obtain a…
We present a measurement of the Hubble constant $H_0$ from surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distances for 63 bright, mainly early-type galaxies out to 100 Mpc observed with the Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared Channel (WFC3/IR) on the…
Context. Abundance anomalies have been observed in field sdB stars and in nearly all Horizontal Branch (HB) stars of globular clusters with Teff > 11 000K whatever be the cluster metallicity. Aims. The aim is to determine the abundance…
Theory and observations indicate that the distribution of stars along the horizontal branch of Galactic globular clusters mainly depends on the metal content. However, the existence of globular clusters with similar metal content and…
By collecting distances from the literature, a set of 73 planetary nebulae with mean distances of high accuracy is derived. This sample is used for recalibration of the mass-radius relationship, used by many statistical distance methods. An…
Measuring distances to galaxies, determining their chemical composition, investigating the nature of their stellar populations and the absorbing properties of their interstellar medium are fundamental activities in modern extragalactic…
We selected BHB stars based on synthetic photometry and stellar atmosphere parameters inferred from Gaia Bp/Rp spectra. We generated the synthetic SDSS broad-band $ugr$ and Pristine narrow-band CaHK magnitudes from Gaia Bp/Rp data. A…
Broadband colours are often used as metallicity proxies in the study of extragalactic globular clusters. A common concern is the effect of variations in horizontal branch (HB) morphology--the second-parameter effect--on such colours. We…
We use the Pristine survey CaHK narrow-band photometry, combined with the SDSS ugr photometry, to provide a cleaner sample of blue horizontal branch stars in the Galactic halo out to large distances. We demonstrate a completeness of 91% and…
We have begun developing a new metallicity calibration for RR Lyrae stars that includes high-temperature phase regions. Our calibration is an updated and expanded version of the Delta-S, equivalent width method, but which is applicable for…
We analyze a sample of tens of thousands of spectra of halo turnoff stars, obtained with the optical spectrographs of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), to characterize the stellar halo population "in situ" out to a distance of a few tens…