The Detection of Bright Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars in the Nearby Elliptical Galaxy Maffei 1

Abstract

We have used the adaptive optics system on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to study a field 6 arcmin from the center of the heavily obscured elliptical galaxy Maffei 1. Our near diffraction-limited H and K' images reveal an excess population of objects with respect to a background field, and we conclude that the asymptotic giant branch tip (AGB-tip) in Maffei 1 occurs at K = 20 +/- 0.25. Assuming that stars at the AGB-tip in Maffei 1 have the same intrinsic luminosity as those in the bulge of M31, then the actual distance modulus of Maffei 1 is 28.2 +/- 0.3 if A_V = 5.1, which corresponds to a distance of 4.4 (+0.6, -0.5) Mpc. This is in excellent agreement with the distance estimated from surface brightness flucuations in the infrared, and confirms that Maffei 1 is too distant to significantly affect the dynamics of the Local Group.

10 pages of text and 2 postscript figures. To appear in the Astrophysical Journal (Letters)

References in corpus (4)

• Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant
• The Solar Motion Relative to the Local Group
• The Evolved Red Stellar Content of M32
• An Infrared Determination of the Reddening and Distance to Dwingeloo 1

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• The quiescent Hubble flow, local dark energy tests, and pairwise velocity dispersion in a $\Omega =1$ universe
• Nuclear Bar Catalyzed Star Formation: 13^CO, C18^O and Molecular Gas Properties in the Nucleus of Maffei 2
• The Extinction and Distance of Maffei 1
• Simulating the recent star formation history in the halo of NGC 5128
• The Upper Asymptotic Giant Branch of the Elliptical Galaxy Maffei 1, and Comparisons with M32 and NGC 5128
• Distance to the galaxy IC 342
• The Kinematic State of the Local Volume
• Raven and the Center of Maffei 1: Multi-Object Adaptive Optics Observations of the Center of a Nearby Elliptical Galaxy and the Detection of an Intermediate Age Population
• The Globular Cluster Content of Maffei 1