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Harmonizing Cosmic Distance Scales in a Post‐Hipparcos Era

About 70 experts from 17 countries attended the colloquium “Harmonizing Cosmic Distance Scales in a Post-Hipparcos Era,” organized by Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory in Haguenau, France, on 1998 September 14–16. An important milestone in the understanding of cosmic distances has been the publication of the Hipparcos catalogs (ESA 1997), which have provided precious data sets for distance determinations with unprecedented precision. Simultaneously, other large efforts—and specifically the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) key projects—are bringing new insight to this controversial subject, making it possible to discuss the convergence of existing determinations. The colloquium brought together experts working on complementary aspects of our understanding of the distance scale of the universe. Most of the presentations concentrated on primary and secondary distance determination indicators in our Galaxy as the first steps of the distance ladder and their extension to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and external galaxies. The scientific program included 12 invited reviews, a dozen oral communications, and about 25 contributed posters. In the introductory talk, Barry Madore placed the quest for a distance scale of the universe in its historical and philosophical contexts. He insisted that when we are discussing the distance scale, we have to ask ourselves where are the (hidden) assumptions and what are the systematics. Catherine Turon and Michael Perryman reviewed the impact of Hipparcos on the cosmic distance scale. Although a large number of papers have already been published, it is now clear that more complementary observations are needed (e.g., ground-based determinations of multicolor photometry, radial velocity, variability, etc.) in order to make full use of the precise positions and parallaxes from the Hipparcos catalogs. Invited talks by Frédéric Arenou and Xavier Luri addressed the methodological aspects of deriving distances from trigonometric parallaxes (revisiting Lutz-Kelker bias) and calibrating absolute magnitudes (taking into account the Malmquist bias). Luri also discussed the use of the LM method (Luri et al. 1996, A&AS, 117, 405) applied to the luminosity calibration of galactic Cepheids, leading to the rather small distance modulus of for the LMC. 18.35 5 0.13 Stephen Unwin and François Mignard presented expectations for two future space missions. The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), NASA’s first space-based long-baseline optical in-