The Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program. I. An Independent Approach to the Extragalactic Distance Scale Using only Population II Distance Indicators

Abstract

We present an overview of the Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program, an ongoing program to obtain a 3 per cent measurement of the Hubble constant using alternative methods to the traditional Cepheid distance scale. We aim to establish a completely independent route to the Hubble constant using RR Lyrae variables, the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB), and Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). This alternative distance ladder can be applied to galaxies of any Hubble Type, of any inclination, and, utilizing old stars in low density environments, is robust to the degenerate effects of metallicity and interstellar extinction. Given the relatively small number of SNe Ia host galaxies with independently measured distances, these properties provide a great systematic advantage in the measurement of the Hubble constant via the distance ladder. Initially, the accuracy of our value of the Hubble constant will be set by the five Galactic RR Lyrae calibrators with Hubble Space Telescope Fine-Guidance Sensor parallaxes. With Gaia, both the RR Lyrae zero point and TRGB method will be independently calibrated, the former with at least an order of magnitude more calibrators and the latter directly through parallax measurement of tip red giants. As the first end-to-end "distance ladder" completely independent of both Cepheid variables and the Large Magellanic Cloud, this path to the Hubble constant will allow for the high precision comparison at each rung of the traditional distance ladder that is necessary to understand tensions between this and other routes to the Hubble constant.