Related papers: Consistent radial velocities of classical Cepheids…
The radial velocity (RV) method, also known as Doppler spectroscopy, is a powerful technique for exoplanet discovery and characterization. In recent years, progress has been made thanks to the improvements in the quality of spectra from new…
We present a comparative analysis of theoretical and observed light curves of Cepheid variables using Fourier decomposition. The theoretical light curves at multiple wavelengths are generated using stellar pulsation models for chemical…
The period-change rate (PCR) of pulsating variable stars is a useful probe of changes in their interior structure, and thus of their evolutionary stages. So far, the PCRs of Classical Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have been…
Classical Cepheids remain a cornerstone of the cosmic distance scale, and thus characterizing the dependence of their light amplitude on metallicity is important. Period-amplitude diagrams constructed for longer-period classical Cepheids in…
A new version of the Baade--Becker--Wesselink (hereafter BBW) method is proposed, based on direct spectroscopic measurements of effective temperatures of 45 northern Cepheids, made in different pulsating phases. By comparing the temperature…
Galactic Cepheids are necessary tools for calibrating the period-luminosity relation, but distances to individual Galactic Cepheids are difficult to precisely measure and are limited to a small number of techniques such as direct parallax,…
Bisectors of the HARPS cross-correlation function (CCF) can discern between planetary radial-velocity (RV) signals and spurious RV signals from stellar magnetic activity variations. However, little is known about the effects of the stellar…
Redshift-independent distances underpin much of astrophysics, and there exists a plethora of methods to estimate them. However, the extent to which the distances they imply are consistent, while crucial for the integrity of the distance…
We investigate the influence of blending on the Cepheid distance scale. Blending is the close association of a Cepheid with one or more intrinsically luminous stars. High-resolution HST images are compared to our ground-based data, obtained…
With the increasing numbers of large stellar survey projects, the quality and quantity of excellent tracers to study the Milky Way is rapidly growing, one of which is the classical Cepheids. Classical Cepheids are high precision standard…
Fourier decomposition is a well established technique used in stellar pulsation. However the quality of reconstructed light curves using this method is reduced when the observed data have uneven phase coverage. We use simulated annealing…
A variety of on-orbit imaging and spectroscopic observations are used to characterize the Charge Transfer Efficiency (CTE) of the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) aboard the Hubble Space…
We present the first analysis of Cepheid stars observed by the TESS space mission in Sectors 1 to 5. Our sample consists of 25 pulsators: ten fundamental mode, three overtone and two double-mode classical Cepheids, plus three Type II and…
We present medium resolution near-infrared spectral measurements of the carbon monoxide (CO) and the cyano radical (CN) features in 12 Galactic classical Cepheids. The pulsation periods of our sample range from 5.5 to 69 days, and the stars…
We present a new extended and detailed set of models for Classical Cepheid pulsators at solar chemical composition ($Z=0.02$, $Y=0.28$) based on a well tested nonlinear hydrodynamical approach. In order to model the possible dependence on…
The distance modulus of a galaxy determined from Cepheids differs from its distance modulus determined from Tully-Fisher by an amount that is proportional to the galaxy's line width, W: Delta mu ~ (-1.73\pm 0.46)log(W). While a…
We used Optical, Near Infrared photometry and radial velocity data for a sample of 11 Cepheids belonging to the young LMC blue populous cluster NGC 1866 to estimate their radii and distances on the basis of the CORS Baade-Wesselink method.…
We undertook a long term project, DIRECT, to obtain the direct distances to two important galaxies in the cosmological distance ladder -- M31 and M33 -- using detached eclipsing binaries (DEBs) and Cepheids. While rare and difficult to…
We present a technique to extract radial velocity measurements from echelle spectrograph observations of rapidly rotating stars ($V\sin{i} \gtrsim 50$ km s$^{-1}$). This type of measurement is difficult because the line widths of such stars…
Context. A longstanding challenge for understanding classical Cepheids is the Cepheid mass discrepancy, where theoretical mass estimates using stellar evolution and stellar pulsation calculations have been found to differ by approximately…