The Araucaria Project. The Distance to the Local Group Galaxy WLM from Near-Infrared Photometry of Cepheid Variables

Abstract

We have obtained deep images in the near-infrared J and K filters for several fields in the Local Group galaxy WLM. We report intensity mean magnitudes for 31 Cepheids located in these fields which we previously discovered in a wide-field optical imaging survey of WLM. The data define tight period-luminosity relations in both near-infrared bands which we use to derive the total reddening of the Cepheids in WLM and the true distance modulus of the galaxy from a multiwavelength analysis of the reddened distance moduli in the VIJK bands. From this, we obtain the values E(B-V) = 0.082 $\pm$ 0.02, and $(m-M{)}_0=24.924\pm 0.042$ mag, with a systematic uncertainty in the distance of about $\pm$ 3%. This Cepheid distance agrees extremely well with the distance of WLM determined from the I-band TRGB method by ourselves and others. Most of the reddening of the Cepheids in WLM (0.06 mag) is produced inside the galaxy, demonstrating again the need for an accurate determination of the total reddening and/or the use of infrared photometry to derive Cepheid distances which are accurate to 3% or better, even for small irregular galaxies like WLM.

latex, 6 figures. accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (11)

• A new calibration of Galactic Cepheid Period-Luminosity relations from B to K bands, and a comparison to LMC PL relations
• Quantitative Spectroscopy of 24 A supergiants in the Sculptor galaxy NGC 300: Flux weighted gravity luminosity relationship, metallicity and metallicity gradient
• A Problem with the Clustering of Recent Measures of the Distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud
• VLT spectroscopy of blue supergiants in IC 1613
• The Araucaria Project: the Local Group Galaxy WLM--Distance and metallicity from quantitative spectroscopy of blue Supergiants
• The Araucaria Project. VLT spectra of blue supergiants in WLM: classification and first abundances
• The Araucaria Project: Distance to the Local Group Galaxy NGC 3109 from Near-Infrared Photometry of Cepheids
• Testing the nonlinearity of the BVIcJHKs period-luminosity relations for the Large Magellanic Cloud Cepheids
• The Araucaria Project. Near-Infrared Photometry of Cepheid Variables in the Sculptor Galaxy NGC 55
• The Araucaria Project. The Distance to the Local Group Galaxy WLM from Cepheid Variables discovered in a Wide-Field Imaging Survey
• Carbon Stars and C/M Ratio in the WLM Dwarf Irregular Galaxy

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• The Araucaria Project. The Distance to the Sculptor Galaxy NGC 247 from Near-Infrared Photometry of Cepheid Variables
• The Astrophysical Distance Scale III: Distance to the Local Group Galaxy WLM using Multi-Wavelength Observations of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch, Cepheids, and JAGB Stars
• The Araucaria Project. Distances to Nine Galaxies Based on a Statistical Analysis of their Carbon Stars (JAGB Method)
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• The Araucaria Project: The Distance to the Sculptor Group Galaxy NGC 247 from Cepheid Variables Discovered in a Wide-Field