MCR-TRGB: A Multiwavelength-Covariant, Robust Tip of the Red Giant Branch Measurement Method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new multiwavelength-covariant method for measuring the tip of the red giant branch, improving accuracy especially in regimes with strong color dependence, and applies it to HST data for calibration comparisons.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel n-dimensional Gaussian fitting technique for TRGB measurement across multiple bands, enhancing robustness over traditional edge detection methods.

Findings

The new method outperforms traditional techniques in crowded fields.

Systematic offsets of ~0.1 mag among different model calibrations.

Models struggle to reproduce optical-NIR color-magnitude behavior.

Abstract

We present a new method to measure colors and magnitudes of the tip of the red giant branch in multiple bandpasses simultaneously by fitting an n-dimensional Gaussian to photometry of candidate tip stars. We demonstrate that this method has several advantages over traditional edge detection, particularly in regimes where the TRGB magnitude is strongly color-dependent, as is the case in the near-infrared. We apply this method to a re-reduction of a set of optical and near-IR HST data originally presented in Dalcanton et al. (2012). The re-reduction takes advantage of the increased depth and accuracy in the NIR photometry enabled by simultaneous reduction with higher resolution optical data in crowded fields (Williams et al. 2014). We compare three possible absolute calibrations of the resulting apparent TRGB measurements, one adopting the same distance moduli as in Dalcanton et al. (2012), and two based on predicted TRGB absolute magnitudes from two widely-used, modern sets of model isochrones. We find systematic offsets among the model absolute calibrations at the ~0.1 mag level, in line with previous investigations. The models also have difficulty reproducing the optical-NIR color-magnitude behavior of our measurements, making these observations a useful benchmark for future improvements.