The mid-infrared Leavitt Law for Classical Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

The Cepheid Leavitt Law (LL), also known as the Period-Luminosity relation, is a crucial tool for assembling the cosmic distance ladder. By combining data from the OGLE-IV catalogue with mid-infrared photometry from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we have determined the $3.6$ $\mu$m and $4.5$ $\mu$m LLs for the Magellanic Clouds using around 5000 fundamental-mode Classical Cepheids. Mean magnitudes were determined using a Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) template fitting procedure, with template light curves constructed from a subsample of these Cepheids with fully-phased, well-sampled light curves. The dependence of the Large Magellanic Cloud LL coefficients on various period cuts was tested, in addition to the linearity of the relationship. The zero point of the LL was calibrated using the parallaxes of Milky Way Cepheids from the Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia Data Release 2. Our final calibrated relations are $M_{[3.6]}=-3.246(\pm 0.008)(\log (P)-1.0)-5.784(\pm 0.030)$ and $M_{[4.5]}=-3.162(\pm 0.008)(\log (P)-1.0)-5.751(\pm 0.030)$.

arXiv commentAccepted by MNRAS, the full Cepheid catalogue accompanying this article will be available soon

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