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Register a new userEclipsing Binary Stars as Benchmarks for Trigonometric Parallaxes in the Gaia Era
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Authors
Keivan G. Stassun
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We present fits to the broadband photometric spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of 158 eclipsing binaries (EBs) in the Tycho-2 catalog. These EBs were selected because they have highly precise stellar radii, effective temperatures, and in many cases metallicities previously determined in the literature, and thus have bolometric luminosities that are typically good to $lesssim$ 10%. In most cases the available broadband photometry spans a wavelength range 0.4-10 $mu$m, and in many cases spans 0.15-22 $mu$m. The resulting SED fits, which have only extinction as a free parameter, provide a virtually model-independent measure of the bolometric flux at Earth. The SED fits are satisfactory for 156 of the EBs, for which we achieve typical precisions in the bolometric flux of $approx$ 3%. Combined with the accurately known bolometric luminosity, the result for each EB is a predicted parallax that is typically precise to $lesssim$ 5%. These predicted parallaxes---with typical uncertainties of 200 $mu$as---are 4-5 times more precise than those determined by Hipparcos for 99 of the EBs in our sample, with which we find excellent agreement. There is no evidence among this sample for significant systematics in the Hipparcos parallaxes of the sort that notoriously afflicted the Pleiades measurement. The EBs are distributed over the entire sky, span more than 10 mag in brightness, reach distances of more than 5 kpc, and in many cases our predicted parallaxes should also be more precise than those expected from the Gaia first data release. The EBs studied here can thus serve as empirical, independent benchmarks for these upcoming fundamental parallax measurements.
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Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) trigonometric parallax observations were obtained to directly determine distances to five nearby M-dwarf / M-dwarf eclipsing binary systems. These systems are intrinsically interesting as benchmark systems for establishing basic physical parameters for low-mass stars, such as luminosity L, and radius R. HST/FGS distances are also one of the few direct checks on Gaia trigonometric parallaxes, given the comparable sensitivity in both magnitude limit and determination of parallactic angles. A spectral energy distribution (SED) fit of each systems blended flux output was carried out, allowing for estimation of the bolometric flux from the primary and secondary components of each system. From the stellar M, L, and R values, the low-mass star relationships between L and M, and R and M, are compared against idealized expectations for such stars. An examination on the inclusion of these close M-dwarf/M-dwarf pairs in higher-order common proper motion (CPM) pairs is analysed; each of the 5 systems has indications of being part of a CPM system. Unexpected distances on interesting objects found within the grid of parallactic reference stars are also presented, including a nearby M dwarf and a white dwarf.
We present results from the analysis of 401 RR Lyrae stars (RRLs) belonging to the field of the Milky Way (MW). For a fraction of them multi-band ($V$, $K_{rm s}$, $W1$) photometry, metal abundances, extinction values and pulsation periods are available in the literature and accurate trigonometric parallaxes measured by the Gaia mission alongside Gaia $G$-band time-series photometry have become available with the Gaia second data release (DR2) on 2018 April 25. Using a Bayesian fitting approach we derive new near-, mid-infrared period-absolute magnitude-metallicity ($PMZ$) relations and new absolute magnitude-metallicity relations in the visual ($M_V - {rm [Fe/H]}$) and $G$ bands ($M_G - {rm [Fe/H]}$), based on the Gaia DR2 parallaxes. We find the dependence of luminosity on metallicity to be higher than usually found in the literature, irrespective of the passband considered. Running the adopted Bayesian model on a simulated dataset we show that the high metallicity dependence is not caused by the method, but likely arises from the actual distribution of the data and the presence of a zero-point offset in the Gaia parallaxes. We infer a zero-point offset of $-0.057$ mas, with the Gaia DR2 parallaxes being systematically smaller. We find the RR Lyrae absolute magnitude in the $V$, $G$, $K_{rm s}$ and $W1$ bands at metallicity of [Fe/H]=$-1.5$ dex and period of P = 0.5238 days, based on Gaia DR2 parallaxes to be $M_V = 0.66pm0.06$ mag, $M_G = 0.63pm0.08$ mag, $M_{K_{rm s}} = -0.37pm0.11$ mag and $M_{W1} = -0.41pm0.11$ mag, respectively.
Overview of the determination of astronomical distances from a metrological standpoint. Distances are considered from the Solar System (planetary distances) to extragalactic distances, with a special emphasis on the fundamental step of the trigonometric stellar distances and the giant leap recently experienced in this field thanks to the ESA space astrometry missions Hipparcos and Gaia.
We test the parallaxes reported in the Gaia first data release using the sample of eclipsing binaries with accurate, empirical distances from Stassun & Torres (2016). We find an average offset of $-$0.25$pm$0.05 mas in the sense of the Gaia parallaxes being too small (i.e., the distances too long). The offset does not depend strongly on obvious parameters such as color or brightness. However, we find with high confidence that the offset may depend on ecliptic latitude: the mean offset is $-$0.38$pm$0.06 mas in the ecliptic north and $-$0.05$pm$0.09 mas in the ecliptic south. The ecliptic latitude dependence may also be represented by the linear relation, $Deltapi approx -0.22(pm0.05) -0.003(pm0.001)timesbeta$ mas ($beta$ in degrees). Finally, there is a possible dependence of the parallax offset on distance, with the offset becoming negligible for $pilesssim 1$ mas; we discuss whether this could be caused by a systematic error in the eclipsing binary distance scale, and reject this interpretation as unlikely.
We infer distances and their asymmetric uncertainties for two million stars using the parallaxes published in the Gaia DR1 (GDR1) catalogue. We do this with two distance priors: A minimalist, isotropic prior assuming an exponentially decreasing space density with increasing distance, and an anisotropic prior derived from the observability of stars in a Milky Way model. We validate our results by comparing our distance estimates for 105 Cepheids which have more precise, independently estimated distances. For this sample we find that the Milky Way prior performs better (the RMS of the scaled residuals is 0.40) than the exponentially decreasing space density prior (RMS is 0.57), although for distances beyond 2 kpc the Milky Way prior performs worse, with a bias in the scaled residuals of -0.36 (vs. -0.07 for the exponentially decreasing space density prior). We do not attempt to include the photometric data in GDR1 due to the lack of reliable colour information. Our distance catalogue is available at http://www.mpia.de/homes/calj/tgas distances/main.html as well as at CDS. This should only be used to give individual distances. Combining data or testing models should be done with the original parallaxes, and attention paid to correlated and systematic uncertainties.
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