A Gaia Data Release 3 View on the Tip of the Red Giant Branch Luminosity

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 $M_I^{TRGB}$ =$-4.02$ and $-3.92$ mag respectively, or a midpoint of $-3.970$ ${}_{-0.024}^{+0.042}$ (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 $m_I^{TRGB}$ = $9.82\pm 0.04$ mag in $\omega$ Centauri using ground-based photometry from the most recent version of the database described in Stetson et al. (2019), which gives $M_I^{TRGB}$ = $-3.97$ $\pm$ $0.04$ (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 Maíz Apellániz et al. (2022a).

17 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables. Accepted by ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (5)

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• Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distances with JWST. II. I-band Measurements in a Sample of Hosts of 10 SN Ia Match HST Cepheids
• The red giant branch tip in the SDSS, PS1, JWST, NGRST and Euclid photometric systems. Calibration in optical passbands using Gaia DR3 synthetic photometry
• Automated Identification of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch in Globular Clusters with Gaia Data
• Calibrating the Tip of the Red Giant Branch and measuring Magellanic Cloud distances to 2% exclusively with Gaia