Period-luminosity and period-luminosity-metallicity relations for Galactic RR Lyrae stars in the Sloan bands

TL;DR

This paper establishes the first period-luminosity and period-luminosity-metallicity relations for Galactic RR Lyrae stars in Sloan bands, using Gaia parallaxes and LCO data, enhancing distance measurement tools in these photometric systems.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive PL and PLZ relations in Sloan bands for Galactic RR Lyrae stars, including separate relations for RRab, RRc, and combined populations.

Findings

Derived PL and PLZ relations for RR Lyrae in Sloan bands.

Used Gaia DR3 parallaxes and LCO photometry for calibration.

Separated relations for RRab, RRc, and mixed populations.

Abstract

RR Lyrae stars are excellent tracers of the old population II due to their period-luminosity (PL) and period-luminosity-metallicity (PLZ) relations. While these relations have been investigated in detail in many photometric bands, there are few comprehensive studies about them in Sloan-like systems. We present PL and PLZ relations (as well as their counterparts in Wesenheit magnitudes) in the Sloan-Pan-STARSS gP1rP1iP1 bands obtained for Galactic RR Lyrae stars in the vincinity of the Sun. The data used in this paper were collected with the network of 40 cm telescopes of the Las Cumbres Observatory, and geometric parallaxes were adopted from Gaia Data Release 3. We derived PL and PLZ relations separately for RRab and RRc-type stars, as well as for the mixed population of RRab+RRc stars. To our knowledge, these are the first PL and PLZ relations in the Sloan bands determined using RR Lyrae stars in the Galactic field.