A review of the distance and structure of the Large Magellanic Cloud

✍ Scribed by David R Alves

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 486 KB
• Volume: 48
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1387-6473
• DOI: 10.1016/j.newar.2004.03.001

✦ Synopsis

The average of 14 recent measurements of the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) implies a true modulus of 18.50 AE 0.02 mag, and demonstrates a trend in the past 2 years of convergence toward a standard value. The distance indicators reviewed are the red clump, the tip of the red giant branch, Cepheid, RR Lyrae, and Mira variable stars, cluster main-sequence fitting, supernova 1987A, and eclipsing binaries. The eclipsing binaries yield a consistent distance on average; however, the internal scatter is twice as large as the average measurement error. I discuss parameters of LMC structure that pertain to distance indicators, and speculate that warps discovered using the color of the clump are not really warps.