{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-gaia-data-release-3-view-on-the-tip-of-the","title":"A Gaia Data Release 3 View on the Tip of the Red Giant Branch Luminosity","arxiv_id":"2304.06695","date":"2023-04-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Siyang Li","Stefano Casertano","Adam G. Riess"],"abstract":"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 $ \\beta $), we find $M^{TRGB}_I$ =$-4.02$ and $-3.92$ mag respectively, or a midpoint of $-3.970$ $^{+0.042} _{-0.024}$ (sys) $\\pm$ $0.062$ (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 $\\omega$ 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 $m^{TRGB}_I$ = $ 9.82 \\pm 0.04$ mag in $\\omega$ Centauri using ground-based photometry from the most recent version of the database described in Stetson et al. (2019), which gives $M^{TRGB}_I$ = $-3.97$ $\\pm$ $0.04$ (stat) $\\pm$ 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).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06695v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.06695v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-gaia-data-release-3-view-on-the-tip-of-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/siyangliastro/gaia-dr3-milky-way-trgb","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}