The Araucaria project. The distance to the small Magellanic Cloud from late-type eclipsing binaries

Journal Article · Tue Dec 31 23:00:00 EST 2013 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/780/1/59· OSTI ID:22348353

Graczyk, Dariusz; Pietrzyński, Grzegorz; Gieren, Wolfgang; Pilecki, Bogumił; Villanova, Sandro; Gallenne, Alexandre ^[1]; Thompson, Ian B. ^[2]; Konorski, Piotr; Udalski, Andrzej; Soszyński, Igor; Górski, Marek; Suchomska, Ksenia; Karczmarek, Paulina ^[3]; Kudritzki, Rolf-Peter; Bresolin, Fabio ^[4]

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1. Departamento de Astronomia, Universidad de Concepción, Casilla 160-C, Concepción (Chile)
2. Carnegie Observatories, 813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena, CA 911101-1292 (United States)
3. Warsaw University Observatory, Al. Ujazdowskie 4, 00-478 Warsaw (Poland)
4. Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)

We present a distance determination to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) based on an analysis of four detached, long-period, late-type eclipsing binaries discovered by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey. The components of the binaries show negligible intrinsic variability. A consistent set of stellar parameters was derived with low statistical and systematic uncertainty. The absolute dimensions of the stars are calculated with a precision of better than 3%. The surface brightness-infrared color relation was used to derive the distance to each binary. The four systems clump around a distance modulus of (m – M) = 18.99 with a dispersion of only 0.05 mag. Combining these results with the distance published by Graczyk et al. for the eclipsing binary OGLE SMC113.3 4007, we obtain a mean distance modulus to the SMC of 18.965 ± 0.025 (stat.) ± 0.048 (syst.) mag. This corresponds to a distance of 62.1 ± 1.9 kpc, where the error includes both uncertainties. Taking into account other recent published determinations of the SMC distance we calculated the distance modulus difference between the SMC and the Large Magellanic Cloud equal to 0.458 ± 0.068 mag. Finally, we advocate μ{sub SMC} = 18.95 ± 0.07 as a new 'canonical' value of the distance modulus to this galaxy.

• OSTI ID: 22348353
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 780; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
ACCURACY
BRIGHTNESS
COLOR
DISPERSIONS
ECLIPSE
GRAVITATIONAL LENSES
MAGELLANIC CLOUDS
STARS
SURFACES