1997/11/25 by Mark R. Metzger, Paul L. Schechter · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Cepheid variable #Extinction (optical mineralogy) #Limiting #Limiting magnitude #Milky Way #Photometry (optics) #Radial velocity #Stars #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/300405
published in The Astronomical Journal 116(1), 469-481 (Institute of Physics) · 18 pages, 4 tables, 13 figures (LaTeX / AASTeX)
arxiv created 1997/11/25 · openalex publication_date 1998/07/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present results of a survey of a 6 deg 2 region near l = 60°, b = 0° to search for distant Milky Way Cepheids. Few such Cepheids are known at distances ≳ R 0 , limiting large-scale Milky Way disk models derived from Cepheid kinematics; this work was designed to find a sample of distant Cepheids for use in such models. The survey was conducted in the V and I bands over eight epochs, to a limiting I ≃ 18, with a total of almost 5 million photometric observations of over 1 million stars. We present a catalog of 578 high-amplitude variables discovered in this field. Cepheid candidates were selected from this catalog on the basis of variability and color change and observed again the following season. We confirm 10 of these candidates as Cepheids with periods from 4 to 8 days, most at distances greater than 3 kpc. Many of the Cepheids are heavily reddened by intervening dust, some with implied extinction A V > 10 mag. With a future addition of infrared photometry and radial velocities, these stars alone can provide a constraint on R 0 to 8% and in conjunction with other known Cepheids should provide good estimates of the global disk potential ellipticity.