Related papers: Classical Cepheids, what else?
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…
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…
We investigate the influence of blending on the Cepheid distance scale. Blending leads to systematically low distances to galaxies observed with HST, and therefore to systematically high estimates of the Hubble constant H_0. We select a…
Precise interstellar dust extinction laws are important to infer the intrinsic properties of reddened objects and correctly interpret observations. In this work, we attempt to measure the optical--infrared extinction laws of the Large and…
The universality of the Cepheid Period-Luminosity relations has been under discussion since metallicity effects have been assumed to play a role in the value of the intercept and, more recently, of the slope of these relations. The goal of…
The methods of calibrating the luminosities of galactic Cepheids and determining Cepheid reddenings are considered in some detail. Together with work on NGC4258 this suggests that the calibration presented is valid to about 0.1mag (s.e.) at…
In this work we matched the AKARI archival data to the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment-III (OGLE-III) catalog to derive the mid-infrared period luminosity (PL) relations for Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) Cepheids. Mismatched AKARI…
(abridged) Recent studies, using OGLE data for LMC Cepheids in the optical, strongly suggest that the period-luminosity (PL) relation for the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) Cepheids shows a break or non-linearity at a period of 10 days. In…
Using an updated and significantly augmented sample of Cepheid and TRGB distances to 28 nearby spiral and irregular galaxies, covering a wide range of metallicities, we have searched for evidence of a correlation of the zero-point of the…
Aiming at providing a firm mean distance estimate to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and thus to place it within the internally consistent Local Group distance framework we recently established, we compiled the current-largest database of…
Anomalous Cepheids are radially pulsating stars observed in dwarf galaxies, the Galactic bulge and halo, and globular clusters. Similarly to other radially pulsating stars, they can be used as distance indicators through their…
We have computed stellar evolutionary models for stars in a mass range characteristic of Cepheid variables ($3<m/\Msol<12$) for different metallicities representative of the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds populations. The stellar…
We have observed the dwarf galaxy IC 1613, at multiple epochs in the mid--infrared using Spitzer and contemporaneously in the near--infrared using the new FourStar near-IR camera on Magellan. We have constructed Cepheid period--luminosity…
We have conducted a programme to determine the fundamental parameters of a substantial number of eclipsing binaries of spectral types O and B in the Small Magellanic Cloud. New spectroscopic data, obtained with the two-degree-field…
We accurately determine a new Cepheid distance to M101 (NGC 5457) using archival HST/ACS V and I time series photometry of two fields within the galaxy. We make a slight modification to the ISIS image subtraction package to obtain optimal…
New estimates of the distances of 36 nearby galaxies are presented based on accurate distances of galactic Cepheids obtained by Gieren, Fouque and Gomez (1998) from the geometrical Barnes-Evans method. The concept of 'sosie' is applied to…
The correlation between the luminosities and rotation velocities of galaxies can be used to estimate distances to late-type galaxies. It is an appropriate moment to re-evaluate this method given the great deal of new information available.…
Following an approach developed by Paczy\'nski & Stanek, we derive a distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) by comparing red clump stars from the Hipparcos catalog with the red clump stars observed in two fields in the LMC that were…
The distance to LMC and SMC is a subject of controversy, with the difference between the extreme values in distance moduli exceeding 0.5 mag. While currently the best calibrated method is based on red clump giants, and the near future…
The form and metallicity-dependence of Spitzer mid-infrared Cepheid relations are a source of debate. Consequently, Spitzer 3.6 and 4.5 um period-magnitude and period-color diagrams were re-examined via robust routines, thus providing the…