On the Impact of Cepheid Outliers on the Distance Ladder

Understand

Recent work by Efstathiou (2014) highlighted the importance of outliers in the period-luminosity (PL) relation of Cepheid data on the distance ladder.

• We present a statistical framework designed to address this difficulty, and apply it to the Cepheid data from the Milky Way (MW), the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and the Riess et al.
• (2011) (hereafter R11) dataset.
• We consider two possible models of the outlier population in the R11 Cepheid dataset.