The VMC survey. XIX. Classical Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud

V. RIPEPI + 8 COAUTORES; A.E. PIATTI

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL SUPPLEMENT SERIES

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016 vol. 224 p. 21 - 41

0067-0049

The VISTA near-infrared Y JK s survey of the Magellanic System (VMC) is collecting deep K s -bandtime-series photometry of pulsating variable stars hosted by the two Magellanic Clouds and their con-necting Bridge. In this paper, we present Y, J, K s light curves for a sample of 4172 Small MagellanicCloud (SMC) Classical Cepheids (CCs). These data, complemented with literature V values, allowedus to construct a variety of period-luminosity (P L), period-luminosity-color (P LC), and period-Wesenheit (P W ) relationships, valid for Fundamental (F), First Overtone (FO) and Second Overtone(SO) pulsators. The relations involving V, J, K s bands are in agreement with their counterparts in theliterature. As for the Y band, to our knowledge we present the first CC P L, P W , and P LC relationsever derived using this filter. We also present the first near?infrared P L, P W , and P LC relations forSO pulsators to date. We used P W (V, K s ) to estimate the relative SMC?LMC distance and, in turn,the absolute distance to the SMC. For the former quantity we find a value of ∆μ = 0.55 ± 0.04 mag, inrather good agreement with other evaluations based on CCs, but significantly larger than the resultsobtained from older population II distance indicators. This discrepancy might be due to the differentgeometric distributions of young and old tracers in both Clouds. As for the absolute distance to theSMC, our best estimates are μ SMC = 19.01 ± 0.05 mag and μ SMC = 19.04 ± 0.06 mag, based on twodistance measurements to the LMC, which rely on accurate CC and eclipsing Cepheid binary data,respectively.