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The influence of chemical composition on the properties of Cepheid stars. II-The iron content

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 Added by Silvia Pedicelli
 Publication date 2008
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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The Cepheid period-luminosity (PL) relation is unquestionably one of the most powerful tools at our disposal for determining the extragalactic distance scale. While significant progress has been made in the past few years towards its understanding and characterization both on the observational and theoretical sides, the debate on the influence that chemical composition may have on the PL relation is still unsettled. With the aim to assess the influence of the stellar iron content on the PL relation in the V and K bands, we have related the V-band and the K-band residuals from the standard PL relations of Freedman et al. (2001) and Persson et al. (2004), respectively, to [Fe/H]. We used direct measurements of the iron abundances of 68 Galactic and Magellanic Cepheids from FEROS and UVES high-resolution and high signal-to-noise spectra. We find a mean iron abundance ([Fe/H]) about solar (sigma = 0.10) for our Galactic sample (32 stars), -0.33 dex (sigma = 0.13) for the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) sample (22 stars) and -0.75 dex (sigma = 0.08) for the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) sample (14 stars). Our abundance measurements of the Magellanic Cepheids double the number of stars studied up to now at high resolution. The metallicity affects the V-band Cepheid PL relation and metal-rich Cepheids appear to be systematically fainter than metal-poor ones. These findings depend neither on the adopted distance scale for Galactic Cepheids nor on the adopted LMC distance modulus. Current data do not allow us to reach a firm conclusion concerning the metallicity dependence of the K-band PL relation. The new Galactic distances indicate a small effect, whereas the old ones support a marginal effect.



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We have assessed the influence of the stellar iron content on the Cepheid Period-Luminosity (PL) relation by relating the V band residuals from the Freedman et al (2001) PL relation to [Fe/H] for 37 Galactic and Magellanic Clouds Cepheids. The iron abundances were measured from FEROS and UVES high-resolution and high-signal to noise optical spectra. Our data indicate that the stars become fainter as metallicity increases, until a plateau or turnover point is reached at about solar metallicity. Our data are incompatible with both no dependence of the PL relation on iron abundance, and with the linearly decreasing behavior often found in the literature (e.g. Kennicutt et al 1998, Sakai et al 2004). On the other hand, non-linear theoretical models of Fiorentino et al (2002) provide a fairly good description of the data.
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