The Extragalactic Distance Database: The Color–Magnitude Diagrams/Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distance Catalog

Abstract

The Extragalactic Distance Database (EDD) was created as a repository for high-quality, redshift-independent distances. A key component of EDD is the Color–Magnitude Diagrams/Tip of the Red Giant Branch (CMDs/TRGB) catalog, which provides information on the stellar content of nearby galaxies observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Here we provide a decadal update to this catalog, which has now doubled in size to over 500 galaxies. We highlight the additions to our data reduction and analysis techniques and provide examples of the science that has been made possible with this large data set. We find the TRGB to be a reliable measure for distance, and we aim to extend its distance coverage with HST to every galaxy within 10 Mpc. In the near future, the combination of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will dramatically increase the number of targets within our grasp.

A Maximum Likelihood Calibration of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch Luminosity from High Latitude Field Giants using Gaia Early Data Release 3 Parallaxes

“…F21, based on Hoyt (2021), selects 8 of 25 LMC fields ("Rank 1 & 2"), whose TRGB measurement appears of the highest rank "based on the observed quality of the TRGB detection"; these are brighter than the average field, although it is not clear how this selection process might conform to extragalactic measurements of average halo fields. 6 In NGC 4258, the difference between F21 (based on Jang et al ( 2021)) and two different fields analyzed by Anand et al (2021a) and Anand et al (2021b) arises from a 0.06 mag difference in I T RGB (or 0.04 mag after color standardization). For the MW, F21, following Cerny et al (2020), adopt the distance to Ω Centauri from one detached eclipsing binary system (Thompson et al 2001).…”

“…To constrain β, we look for β in galaxies similar to the Milky Way in structure and composition and have well defined TRGB breaks. We select galaxies that have photometry available on the Extragalactic Distance Database (EDD; Anand et al 2021b) website 5 and are less than 15 Mpc away, are Sab to Sbc type, have an inclination of greater than 70°, have more than 2000 stars in the ±1 mag range around the EDD TRGB, and have a B T luminosity within 2 mag of -19.7 mag. This selection leaves NGC 253, NGC 891, NGC 4258, and NGC 4565.…”

“…The authors note that ML is less sensitive to undersampling bias compared to the Sobel filter method. The method is used to measure distances to over 300 galaxies by Anand et al (2021b). McQuinn et al (2014) and McQuinn et al (2021 also use ML to find the TRGB of dwarf galaxies for the Survey of H I in Extremely Low-mass Dwarfs (SHIELD), adopting an approach similar to Makarov et al (2006).…”

Cosmicflows-4: The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation Providing ~10,000 Distances

“…To summarize, in the case of the CPLR the dominant sources of distance information are Freedman et al ( 2001) and Riess et al (2016) rescaled slightly as described by Riess et al (2019) for consistency with the LMC detached eclipsing binary distance by Pietrzyński et al (2019) and the NGC 4258 maser distance by Humphreys et al (2013). In the case of the TRGB the source in all cases is the compilation maintained in the Color-Magnitude Diagrams/TRGB file in the Extragalactic Distance Database (https://edd.ifa.hawaii.edu) that was described most recently by Anand et al (2021b), with the zero-point calibration established by Rizzi et al (2007). The distances given there are demonstrated by Anand et al (2021a) to be compatible within uncertainties with those discussed by Freedman (2021).…”

Calibration of Surface Brightness Fluctuations for Dwarf Galaxies in the Hyper Suprime-Cam $gi$ Filter System

“…In Table 1 we list basic information of the galaxies sorted by the TRGB distances. F814W TRGB magnitudes of all the galaxies were obtained from Extragalactic Distance Database (EDD) (Tully et al 2009;Jacobs et al 2009;Anand et al 2021) to convert TRGB magnitudes to distances. Note that the TRGB calibration we use in this study is consistent with the calibration in Blakeslee et al (2021) in tying the SBF method to the TRGB for massive earlytype galaxies.…”