Hipparcos calibration of the tip of the Red Giant Branch

Abstract

We have detected the tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) in the solar neighborhood using near infrared photometry from the 2MASS and DIRBE catalogs, and revised Hipparcos parallaxes. We confirm that the revised Hipparcos parallaxes are superior to the original ones, and that this improvement is necessary to detect the TRGB. We find a tip absolute magnitude of M_K=-6.85+/-0.03, in agreement with that expected from previous tip measurements of the Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud, and Bulge. This represents the first geometric calibration of the TRGB and extends previous calibrations, based on metal-poor globular clusters, to solar metallicities. We attempted to use the TRGB to confirm the presence of the Lutz-Kelker bias, with inconclusive results. Attempts to detect the tip in the I-band also produced inconsistent results, due to a lack of precise, homogeneous photometry for these bright stars.

4 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

References in corpus (4)

• Sharpening the Tip of the Red Giant Branch
• Comparison of Distances from RR Lyrae Stars, the Tip of the Red-Giant Branch and Classical Cepheids
• Metallicity-corrected Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distance to NGC 4258
• An empirical tool to derive metallicity, reddening and distance for old stellar populations from near IR Color Magnitude Diagrams

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