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[2005.02445] The Accuracy of the Hubble Constant Measurement Verified through Cepheid Amplitudes

Posted: May 07 2020
by Shaun Hotchkiss
A reminder that I've been making technical cosmology videos. The format is me interviewing authors of papers I found interesting. The most recent is on this paper and is now online here. The idea is for this to fill the same niche as a departmental seminar or plenary conference talk, so it is technical, but not meant to be only for those already working on the specific topic. Hopefully it will be of some (potential) benefit to all people at the level of a Cosmology PhD student or above, whatever their own research is on.

I also hope the interview technique makes the talk slightly more fun to watch than a dry webinar. The feedback from speakers so far is that they certainly prefer an interview instead of speaking at their computer without feedback for 50 minutes.

The paper itself is interesting because it rules out what was before this perhaps the leading candidate for a possible systematic error in the distance ladder measurements of H0. Of course, there are now multiple measurements of H0 in the local universe, so if the resolution is systematic errors it would need to be multiple errors in more than one method. But it is still important science to hunt down all possible systematics and make sure they're small, so this is a useful few pages of the full H0 detective novel.

Feedback is definitely welcomed! As are requests to be interviewed and requests for videos on specific papers.