Toward a New Geometric Distance to the Active Galaxy NGC 4258. III. Final Results and the Hubble Constant

TL;DR

This paper presents a precise geometric distance measurement to galaxy NGC 4258 using maser observations, refining the Hubble Constant to 72 km/s/Mpc with a 3% uncertainty, which aids in calibrating cosmic distance scales.

Contribution

It introduces a new model incorporating disk warping and elliptical maser orbits for more accurate distance estimation to NGC 4258.

Findings

Distance to NGC 4258 is 7.60 Mpc with 3% uncertainty.

Derived Hubble Constant is 72.0 km/s/Mpc.

Model accounts for disk warping and orbital precession.

Abstract

We report a new geometric maser distance estimate to the active galaxy NGC 4258. The data for the new model are maser line-of-sight velocities and sky positions from 18 epochs of Very Long Baseline Interferometry observations, and line-of-sight accelerations measured from a 10-year monitoring program of the 22 GHz maser emission of NGC 4258. The new model includes both disk warping and confocal elliptical maser orbits with differential precession. The distance to NGC 4258 is 7.60 +/- 0.17 +/- 0.15 Mpc, a 3% uncertainty including formal fitting and systematic terms. The resulting Hubble Constant, based on the use of the Cepheid Variables in NGC 4258 to recalibrate the Cepheid distance scale (Riess et al. 2011), is H_0 = 72.0 +/- 3.0 km/s/Mpc.