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We use a newly developed observing mode on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Wide Field Camera 3, spatial scanning, to increase source sampling a thousand-fold and measure changes in source positions to a precision of 20-40 μas, more than an order of magnitude better than attainable in pointed observations. This observing mode can usefully measure the parallaxes of bright stars at distances of up to 5 kpc, a factor of 10 farther than achieved thus far with HST. The technique should also provide a unique crosscheck of future parallax measurements from Gaia. Long-period classical Cepheid variable stars in the Milky Way, nearly all of which reside beyond 1 kpc, are especially compelling targets for parallax measurements from scanning, as they may be used to anchor a determination of the Hubble constant to ∼1%. We illustrate the method by measuring to high precision the parallax of a classical Cepheid, SY Aurigae, at a distance of more than 2 kpc, using five epochs of spatial-scan data obtained at intervals of six months. Rapid spatial scans also enable photometric measurements of bright Milky Way Cepheids—which would otherwise saturate even in the shortest possible pointed observations—on the same flux scale as extragalactic Cepheids, which is a necessity for reducing a leading source of systematic error in the Hubble constant. We demonstrate this capability with photometric measurements of SY Aur on the same system used for Cepheids in Type Ia supernova host galaxies. While the technique and results presented here are preliminary, an ongoing program with HST is collecting such parallax measurements for another 18 Cepheids to produce a better anchor for the distance scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past analyses of Type Ia supernovae have identified an irreducible scatter of 5%-10% in distance, widely attributed to an intrinsic dispersion in luminosity. Another equally valid source of this scatter is intrinsic dispersion in color. Misidentification of the true source of this scatter can bias both the retrieved color-luminosity relation and cosmological parameter measurements. The size of this bias depends on the magnitude of the intrinsic color dispersion relative to the distribution of colors that correlate with distance. We produce a realistic simulation of a misattribution of intrinsic scatter and find a negative bias in the recovered color-luminosity relation, β, of Δβ ≈ –1.0 (∼33%) and a positive bias in the equation of state parameter, w, of Δw ≈ +0.04 (∼4%). We re-analyze current published datasets with the assumption that the distance scatter is predominantly the result of color. Unlike previous analyses, we find that the data are consistent with a Milky-Way-like reddening law (RV = 3.1) and that a Milky-Way dust model better predicts the asymmetric color-luminosity trends than the conventional luminosity scatter hypothesis. We also determine that accounting for color variation reduces the correlation between various host galaxy properties and Hubble residuals by ∼20%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]