Papers › A Gaia Data Release 3 View on the Tip of the Red Giant Branch Luminosity
A Gaia Data Release 3 View on the Tip of the Red Giant Branch Luminosity
Siyang Li, Stefano Casertano, Adam G. Riess
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The tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) is a standard candle that can be used to help refine the determination of the Hubble constant. Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) provides synthetic photometry constructed from low-resolution BP/RP spectra for Milky Way field stars that can be used to directly calibrate the luminosity of the TRGB in the Johnson-Cousins I band, where the TRGB is least sensitive to metallicity. We calibrate the TRGB luminosity using a two-dimensional maximum likelihood algorithm with field stars and Gaia synthetic photometry and parallaxes. For a high-contrast and low-contrast break (characterized by the values of the contrast parameter $ R$ or the magnitude of the break β), we find Mᵀᴿᴳᴮ_I =-4.02 and -3.92 mag respectively, or a midpoint of -3.970 ^(+0.042) _(-0.024) (sys) ± $0.062$ (stat) mag. This measurement improves upon the TRGB measurement from Li et al. (2022), as the higher precision photometry based on $ Gaia $ DR3 allows us to constrain two additional free parameters of the luminosity function. We also investigate the possibility of using Gaia DR3 synthetic photometry to calibrate the TRGB luminosity with ω Centauri, but find evidence of blending within the inner region for cluster member photometry that precludes accurate calibration with Gaia DR3 photometry. We instead provide an updated TRGB measurement of mᵀᴿᴳᴮ_I = 9.82 ±0.04 mag in ω Centauri using ground-based photometry from the most recent version of the database described in Stetson et al. (2019), which gives Mᵀᴿᴳᴮ_I = -3.97 ± $0.04$ (stat) ± 0.10 (sys) mag when tied to the Gaia EDR3 parallax distance from the consensus of Vasiliev & Baumgardt (2021), Soltis et al. (2021), and Ma\'{i}z Apell\'{a}niz et al. (2022a).
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