Journal article
Detection of surface brightness fluctuations in NGC 4373 using the Hubble Space Telescope
MA Pahre, JR Mould, A Dressler, JA Holtzman, AM Watson, JS Gallagher, GE Ballester, CJ Burrows, S Casertano, JT Clarke, D Crisp, RE Griffiths, CJ Grillmair, JJ Hester, JG Hoessel, PA Scowen, KR Stapelfeldt, JT Trauger, JA Westphal
The Astrophysical Journal | Published : 1999
DOI: 10.1086/306998
Abstract
Surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) have been detected for three elliptical galaxies - NGC 3379 in the Leo group, NGC 4406 in the Virgo cluster, and NGC 4373 in the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster -using marginally sampled, deep images taken with the Planetary Camera of the WFPC2 instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The power spectrum of the fluctuations image is well fitted by an empirical model of the point-spread function constructed using point sources identified in the field. Comparison with high-quality ground-based observations of all three galaxies show excellent agreement in the measurement of the distance modulus over a substantial range in distance. This demonstrates the..
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