Investigating Gaia EDR3 parallax systematics using asteroseismology of Cool Giant Stars observed by Kepler, K2, and TESS II. Deciphering Gaia parallax systematics using red clump stars

Abstract

We analyse Gaia EDR3 parallax systematics as a function of magnitude and sky location using a recently published catalogue of 12,500 asteroseismic red-giant star distances. We selected ~ 3500 red clump (RC) stars of similar chemical composition as the optimal subsample for this purpose. We perform a detailed assessment of systematic uncertainties relevant for parallax offset estimation based on the asteroseismic distances. Following this assessment, we adopt for our baseline analysis the asteroseismic parameters measured as in Elsworth et al. (2020), spectroscopy from APOGEE (DR17), and we further restrict the sample to low-extinction RC stars with quality astrometric solutions from Gaia EDR3. We then investigated both the parallax offset relative to the published Gaia EDR3 parallaxes and the residual parallax offset after correcting Gaia EDR3 parallaxes following Lindegren et al. (2021). We find residual parallax offsets very close to zero (-1.6 +/- 0.5 (stat.) +/- 10 (syst.) muas) for stars fainter than G > 11 mag in the initial Kepler field. For 17 K2 campaigns in the same magnitude range, the residual parallax offset is +16.5 +/- 1.7 (stat.) +/- 10 (syst.) muas. At brighter magnitudes (G <= 11 mag), we find inconsistent residual parallax offsets between the Kepler field, 17 K2 campaigns, and the TESS southern continuous viewing zone, with differences of up to 60 muas. This suggests a significant dependence on sky location at bright magnitudes due to the lack of bright physical pairs available for determining the parallax offset corrections. Finally, we estimate the absolute magnitude of the RC and obtain M_Ks^RC = -1.650 +/- 0.025 mag in the 2MASS Ks-band and M_G^RC = (0.432 +/- 0.004) - (0.821 +/- 0.033) (Teff [K] - 4800K)/1000K [mag] in the Gaia G-band.

12 pages, 10 figures, resubmitted to A&A (shortened abstract)

References in corpus (24)

• The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
• The K2 Mission: Characterization and Early results
• Cosmic Distances Calibrated to 1% Precision with Gaia EDR3 Parallaxes and Hubble Space Telescope Photometry of 75 Milky Way Cepheids Confirm Tension with LambdaCDM
• Gaia EDR3 view on Galactic globular clusters
• Parallax Systematics and Photocenter Motions of Benchmark Eclipsing Binaries in Gaia EDR3
• Cluster Cepheids with High Precision Gaia Parallaxes, Low Zeropoint Uncertainties, and Hubble Space Telescope Photometry
• Red clump stars and Gaia: Calibration of the standard candle using a hierarchical probabilistic model
• A New Method for the Asteroseismic Determination of the Evolutionary State of Red-Giant Stars
• The Parallax Zero-Point of Gaia Early Data Release 3 from LAMOST Primary Red Clump Stars
• Gaia EDR3 Parallax Zero-point Offset based on W Ursae Majoris-type Eclipsing Binaries
• A 0.9% Calibration of the Galactic Cepheid luminosity scale based on Gaia DR3 data of open clusters and Cepheids
• Testing asteroseismology with Gaia DR2: Hierarchical models of the Red Clump
• The K2 Galactic Archaeology Program Data Release 3: Age-abundance patterns in C1-C8 and C10-C18
• RR Lyrae variables in Messier 53: Near-infrared Period--Luminosity relations and the calibration using Gaia Early Data Release 3
• Asteroseismology of the multiple stellar populations in the Globular Cluster M4
• Metallicities from high resolution spectra of 49 RR Lyrae Variables
• Seismic performance
• A Maximum Likelihood Calibration of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch Luminosity from High Latitude Field Giants using Gaia Early Data Release 3 Parallaxes
• Cepheid metallicity in the Leavitt law (C-MetaLL) survey -- III. Simultaneous derivation of the Gaia parallax offset and Period-Luminosity-Metallicity coefficients
• The extinction law in the inner $3\times 3$ deg${}^2$ of the Milky Way and the red clump absolute magnitude in the inner bar-bulge
• HD-TESS: An Asteroseismic Catalog of Bright Red Giants within TESS Continuous Viewing Zones
• Red Horizontal Branch stars: an asteroseismic perspective
• A spatially dependent correction of Gaia EDR3 parallax zero-point offset based on 0.3 million LAMOST DR8 giant stars
• Investigating Gaia EDR3 parallax systematics using asteroseismology of Cool Giant Stars observed by Kepler, K2, and TESS I. Asteroseismic distances to 12,500 red-giant stars

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics
• The Local Distance Network: a community consensus report on the measurement of the Hubble constant at 1% precision
• VELOcities of CEpheids (VELOCE) I. High-precision radial velocities of Cepheids
• VELOcities of CEpheids (VELOCE) II. Systematic Search for Spectroscopic Binary Cepheids
• A joint 1% calibration of the RR Lyrae & type-II Cepheid Leavitt laws yields homogeneous distances to 93 Galactic globular clusters
• Cepheid Metallicity in the Leavitt Law (C-MetaLL) survey: IX. Metallicity dependence of Period-Wesenheit relations based on a homogeneous spectroscopic sample