An eclipsing binary distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud accurate to 2 per cent

Understand

In the era of precision cosmology it is essential to determine the Hubble Constant with an accuracy of 3% or better.

• Currently, its uncertainty is dominated by the uncertainty in the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) which as the second nearest galaxy serves as the best anchor point of the cosmic distance scale.
• Observations of eclipsing binaries offer a unique opportunity to precisely and accurately measure stellar parameters and distances.
• The eclipsing binary method was previously applied to the LMC but the accuracy of the distance results was hampered by the need to model the bright, early-type systems used in these studies.