Optical Identification of Cepheids in 19 Host Galaxies of Type Ia Supernovae and NGC 4258 with the Hubble Space Telescope [SSA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08658


We present results of an optical search for Cepheid variable stars using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in 19 hosts of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) and the maser-host galaxy NGC 4258, conducted as part of the SH0ES project (Supernovae and H0 for the Equation of State of dark energy). The targets include 9 newly imaged SN Ia hosts using a novel strategy based on a long-pass filter that minimizes the number of HST orbits required to detect and accurately determine Cepheid properties. We carried out a homogeneous reduction and analysis of all observations, including new universal variability searches in all SN Ia hosts, that yielded a total of 2200 variables with well-defined selection criteria — the largest such sample identified outside the Local Group. These objects are used in a companion paper to determine the local value of H0 with a total uncertainty of 2.4%.

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S. Hoffmann, L. Macri, A. Riess, et. al.
Mon, 1 Aug 16
32/54

Comments: ApJ, in press