Data: 23.04.2024

Richard Anderson (EPFL, Lausanne)

Towards a direct 1% measurement of the Hubble constant using standard candles

Streszczenie:
I will review recent work aimed at measuring the Hubble constant to 1% using the extragalactic distance ladder, with a focus on the stellar standard candles. Specifically, I will present progress in the understanding of Gaia parallax systematics unraveled by asteroseismology, the most accurate absolute calibration of Cepheids based on Gaia parallaxes of Galactic open star clusters, and recent improvements to Cepheid photometry enabled by the unprecedented near-infrared spatial resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope. In turn, I will present recent improvements to the Tip of the Red Giant Branch calibration in the Large Magellanic Cloud and their implications for measuring distances and the Hubble constant using the TRGB method.

Bio

Richard Anderson leads the Stellar Standard Candles and Distances research group at EPFL’s Institute of Physic He is an SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Fellow and the principal investigator of the H1PStars project (ERC Starting Grant) and lead of this group.

Richard received his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Geneva in December 2013 and a Diplom degree in Physics from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 200 Before that he worked at the Johns Hopkins University with Adam Riess in Baltimore from 2014 to 2017. From 2017 to 2020, he was a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching.