2004/11/23 by M. Romaniello, F. Primas, M. Mottini +5 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomical and nuclear sciences #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361:200400110
published as Astron.Astrophys. 429 (2005) L37 · 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for pubblication in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters (Table 1 will only appear in electronic form). Revised version (23.11.04) to fix typo in Table 1 (the V magnitudes for Galactic stars were wrong)
arxiv created 2004/11/23 · openalex publication_date 2004/12/17 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
We have assessed the influence of the stellar iron content on the Cepheid Period–Luminosity (PL) relation by relating the V band residuals from the Freedman et al. ([CITE]) PL relation to [Fe/H] for 37 Galactic and Magellanic Clouds Cepheids. The iron abundances were measured from FEROS and UVES high-resolution and high-signal to noise optical spectra. Our data indicate that the stars become fainter as metallicity increases, until a plateau or turnover point is reached at about solar metallicity. Our data are incompatible with both no dependence of the PL relation on iron abundance, and with the linearly decreasing behavior often found in the literature (e.g. Kennicutt et al. [CITE]; Sakai et al. [CITE]). On the other hand, non-linear theoretical models of Fiorentino et al. ([CITE]) provide a fairly good description of the data.