Abstract
Classical Cepheids remain a cornerstone of the cosmic distance scale, and thus characterizing the dependence of their light amplitude on metallicity is important. Period-amplitude diagrams constructed for longer-period classical Cepheids in IC 1613, NGC 3109, SMC, NGC 6822, LMC, and the Milky Way imply that very metal-poor Cepheids typically exhibit smaller V-band amplitudes than their metal-rich counterparts. The results provide an alternate interpretation relative to arguments for a null and converse metallicity dependence. The empirical results can be employed to check predictions from theoretical models, to approximate mean abundances for target populations hosting numerous long-period Cepheids, and to facilitate the identification of potentially blended or peculiar objects.
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Notes
The Yoachim et al. (2009) code for fitting template lightcurves to sparse Cepheid observations is available at http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/yoachim/code.php.
Evans (1995), Szabados (2003b), see also http://konkoly.hu/CEP/intro.html.
That Araucaria-based Cepheid distance agrees with a mean inferred from 18 published estimates tied to other methods: \(d=1.33\pm0.08(\sigma_{\bar{x}}) \pm0.34 (\sigma)\) Mpc (NED-D, Steer and Madore 2011).
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Acknowledgements
DM is grateful to the following individuals and consortia whose efforts or advice enabled the research: OGLE (A. Udalski, I. Soszyñski), LCID (E. Bernard), L. Szabados, P. Klagyivik, R. Luck, V. Kovtyukh, G. Bono, C. Ngeow, H. Neilson, NED (I. Steer), M. Mottini, G. Benedict, A. van Genderen, CDS, arXiv, and NASA ADS. WG is grateful for support from the BASAL Centro de Astrofisica y Tecnologias Afines (CATA) PFB-06/2007.
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Majaess, D., Turner, D., Gieren, W. et al. On the metallicity dependence of classical Cepheid light amplitudes. Astrophys Space Sci 344, 381–388 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-012-1331-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-012-1331-z