Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances for MASSIVE and Type Ia Supernova Host Galaxies

Abstract

We measured high-quality surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distances for a sample of 63 massive early-type galaxies using the WFC3/IR camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. The median uncertainty on the SBF distance measurements is 0.085 mag, or 3.9% in distance. Achieving this precision at distances of 50 to 100 Mpc required significant improvements to the SBF calibration and data analysis procedures for WFC3/IR data. Forty-two of the galaxies are from the MASSIVE Galaxy Survey, a complete sample of massive galaxies within ~100 Mpc; the SBF distances for these will be used to improve the estimates of the stellar and central supermassive black hole masses in these galaxies. Twenty-four of the galaxies are Type Ia supernova hosts, useful for calibrating SN Ia distances for early-type galaxies and exploring possible systematic trends in the peak luminosities. Our results demonstrate that the SBF method is a powerful and versatile technique for measuring distances to galaxies with evolved stellar populations out to 100 Mpc and constraining the local value of the Hubble constant.

Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series; 22 pages, 7 figures, with 61 additional figures to be published as an online figure set

References in corpus (22)

• Large Magellanic Cloud Cepheid Standards Provide a 1% Foundation for the Determination of the Hubble Constant and Stronger Evidence for Physics Beyond LambdaCDM
• The hierarchical formation of the brightest cluster galaxies
• HyperLEDA. III. The catalogue of extragalactic distances
• Cosmic Distances Calibrated to 1% Precision with Gaia EDR3 Parallaxes and Hubble Space Telescope Photometry of 75 Milky Way Cepheids Confirm Tension with LambdaCDM
• A distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to one per cent
• A systematic variation of the stellar initial mass function in early-type galaxies
• Cosmological parameters from the comparison of peculiar velocities with predictions from the 2M++ density field
• The Carnegie Supernova Project: Intrinsic Colors of Type Ia Supernovae
• The MASSIVE Survey - I. A Volume-Limited Integral-Field Spectroscopic Study of the Most Massive Early-Type Galaxies within 108 Mpc
• The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances
• Galaxy Groups: A 2MASS Catalog
• The MASSIVE Survey - V. Spatially-Resolved Stellar Angular Momentum, Velocity Dispersion, and Higher Moments of the 41 Most Massive Local Early-Type Galaxies
• Cosmicflows-3: Two Distance$-$Velocity Calculators
• The peculiar velocity field up to $z\sim 0.05$ by forward-modeling Cosmicflows-3 data
• The MASSIVE Survey - VIII. Stellar Velocity Dispersion Profiles and Environmental Dependence of Early-Type Galaxies
• The MASSIVE survey - XI. What drives the molecular gas properties of early-type galaxies
• The MASSIVE Survey - XII Connecting Stellar Populations of Early-Type Galaxies to Kinematics and Environment
• The Changing Fractions of Type Ia Supernova NUV-Optical Subclasses with Redshift
• The MASSIVE Survey VI: The Spatial Distribution and Kinematics of Warm Ionized Gas in the Most Massive Local Early-type Galaxies
• The MASSIVE Survey -- XV. A Stellar Dynamical Mass Measurement of the Supermassive Black Hole in Massive Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1453
• Reddened, Redshifted, or Intrinsically Red? Understanding Near-Ultraviolet Colors of Type Ia Supernovae
• The MASSIVE Survey XIII -- Spatially Resolved Stellar Kinematics in the Central 1 kpc of 20 Massive Elliptical Galaxies with the GMOS-North Integral-Field Spectrograph

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Triaxial Orbit-based Dynamical Modeling of Galaxies with Supermassive Black Holes and an Application to Massive Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1453
• The MASSIVE survey -- XIX. Molecular gas measurements of the supermassive black hole masses in the elliptical galaxies NGC 1684 and NGC 0997
• SN 2019ein: A Type Ia Supernova Likely Originated from a Sub-Chandrasekhar-Mass Explosion