Reconstruction of Cepheid Radial Velocity Curves from the shape of the V-band Light Curves

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel method to reconstruct Cepheid radial velocity curves solely from their V-band light curves and pulsation periods, enabling distance measurements without spectroscopic data.

Contribution

It establishes the first reliable correlations between light curve and radial velocity Fourier parameters for short-period Cepheids, facilitating purely photometric RV curve reconstruction.

Findings

Reconstructed RV curves have an uncertainty of about 0.60 km/s.

Individual Cepheid radius variations are accurate to less than 1%.

Method is applicable to extragalactic Cepheids using photometric data alone.

Abstract

This paper aims to develop the first method to reconstruct the shape of the RV curves of short-period fundamental-mode Cepheids, based exclusively on their pulsation period and the morphology of their $V$-band light curves (LCs). We compiled a dataset of high-quality spectroscopic and photometric measurements from the literature for 81 short-period fundamental-mode Galactic Cepheids up to a pulsation period of 8\,days, enabling precise determination of the Fourier parameters and their uncertainties. We investigated correlations between LC and RV Fourier parameters and used these relations to reconstruct the RV curves. We further assessed the accuracy of these reconstructions by examining potential metallicity effects with an additional dataset of 23 metal-poor Cepheids. For pulsation periods between 3.5 and 7.0\,days, we found tight correlations between different combinations of LC and RV Fourier parameters up to order 7, in particular $R_{21}(RV)/R_{21}(LC)$ and $R_{31}(RV)/R_{31}(LC)$ are correlated with the pulsation period. These relationships enable the reconstruction of RV curves of Cepheids with their LC. The reconstructed curve has an uncertainty of about 0.60${\rm km\,s}^{-1}$ relative to the Fourier fit of true spectroscopic RV measurements. For individual Cepheids, the reconstructed RV curves integrated along the pulsation cycle (i.e. the linear radius variations) are accurate to less than 1\% and precise to within 4.16\% in comparison to the integrated true spectroscopic RV curves. This approach provides a valuable tool for the reconstruction of RV curves for extragalactic Cepheids through photometric data alone. It opens the road to a purely photometric parallax-of-pulsation method in the context of photometric surveys, such as the Vera Rubin Telescope.