paper

Calibrating the Tully-Fisher Relation to Measure the Hubble Constant

arXiv:2412.08449

Abstract

Boubel et al. 2024 (B24) recently used the Tully-Fisher (TF) relation to measure calibrated distances in the Hubble flow and found km/s/Mpc. The large systematic uncertainty was the result of propagating the conflict between two sources of empirical distance calibration: a difference in zeropoint when calibrating the TF relation with Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) versus Cepheids and Tip-of-the-Red-Giant-Branch (TRGB) and an apparent difference in zeropoint between two distinct TRGB datasets. We trace the SN Ia-based calibration used in the TF analysis to a study where was fixed to 70 km/s/Mpc rather than measured, (with host distances derived from redshifts and the Hubble law), thus introducing a discrepancy with the other empirically calibrated indicators. In addition, we trace the difference in TRGB zeropoints to a miscalibration of mag that should be mag. Using the consistent Cepheid and TRGB calibration from B24 while removing the problematic data reduces the systematic error by a factor of two and results in km/s/Mpc. This measurement is consistent with previous determinations of using the TF relation. We also show that most determinations of measurements that replace Type Ia supernovae measurements with another far-field distance indicator yield km/s/Mpc, reinforcing previous findings that the Hubble tension is not tied to any one distance indicator.

Comments very welcome. Submitting to Research Notes of the AAS next week

Cited by in corpus (4)