Absolute Calibration of Cepheid Period-Luminosity Relations in NGC 4258

Understand

NGC 4258 is one of the most important anchors for calibrating the Cepheid period--luminosity relations (PLRs) owing to its accurate distance measured from water maser motions.

• We expand on previous efforts and carry out a new Cepheid search in this system using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
• We discover and measure a sample of 669 Cepheids in four new and two archival NGC 4258 fields, doubling the number of known Cepheids in this galaxy and obtaining an absolute calibration of their optical PLRs.
• We determine a Wesenheit PLR of $-2.574(\pm0.034) -3.294(\pm0.042) \log P$, consistent with an independent Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) calibration at the level of $0.032\pm0.044$~mag in its zeropoint, after accounting for a metallicity dependence of $-0.20\pm0.05$~mag\,dex$^{-1}$ (Riess et al.