The distance scale is fundamental to cosmology. How big is the universe? is pretty much the first question we ask when we look at the Big Picture.
The primary yardstick we use to describe the scale of the universe is Hubble’s constant: the H0 in
v = H0 D
that relates the recession velocity (redshift) of a galaxy to its distance. More generally, this is the current expansion rate of the universe. Pick up any book on cosmology and you will find a lengthy disquisition on the importance of this fundamental parameter that encapsulates the size, age, critical density, and potential fate of the cosmos. It is the first of the Big Two numbers in cosmology that expresses the still-amazing fact that the entire universe is expanding.
Quantifying the distance scale is hard. Throughout my career, I have avoided working on it. There are quite enough, er, personalities on the case already.
No need for me to add to the madness.
Not that I couldn’t. The Tully-Fisher relation has long been used as a distance indicator. It played an important role in breaking the stranglehold that H0 = 50 km/s/Mpc had on the minds of cosmologists, including myself. Tully & Fisher (1977) found that it was approximately 80 km/s/Mpc. Their method continues to provide strong constraints to this day: Kourkchi et al. find H0 = 76.0 ± 1.1(stat) ± 2.3(sys) km s-1 Mpc-1. So I’ve been happy to stay out of it.
Until now.
I am motivated in part by the calibration opportunity provided by gas rich galaxies, in part by the fact that tension in independent approaches to constrain the Hubble constant only seems to be getting worse, and in part by a recent conference experience. (Remember when we traveled?) Less than a year ago, I was at a cosmology conference in which I heard an all-too-typical talk that asserted that the Planck H0 = 67.4 ± 0.5 km/s/Mpc had to be correct and everybody who got something different was a stupid-head. I’ve seen this movie before. It is the same community (often the very same people) who once insisted that H0 had to be 50, dammit. They’re every bit as overconfident as before, suffering just as much from confirmation bias (LCDM! LCDM! LCDM!), and seem every bit as likely to be correct this time around.
So, is it true? We have the data, we’ve just refrained from using it in this particular way because other people were on the case. Let’s check.
The big hassle here is not measuring H0 so much as quantifying the uncertainties. That’s the part that’s really hard. So all credit goes to Jim Schombert, who rolled up his proverbial sleeves and did all the hard work. Federico Lelli and I mostly just played the mother-of-all-jerks referees (I’ve had plenty of role models) by asking about every annoying detail. To make a very long story short, none of the items under our control matter at a level we care about, each making < 1 km/s/Mpc difference to the final answer.
In principle, the Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR) helps over the usual luminosity-based version by including the gas, which extends application of the relation to lower mass galaxies that can be quite gas rich. Ignoring this component results in a mess that can only be avoided by restricting attention to bright galaxies. But including it introduces an extra parameter. One has to adopt a stellar mass-to-light ratio to put the stars and the gas on the same footing. I always figured that would make things worse – and for a long time, it did. That is no longer the case. So long as we treat the calibration sample that defines the BTFR and the sample used to measure the Hubble constant self-consistently, plausible choices for the mass-to-light ratio return the same answer for H0. It’s all relative – the calibration changes with different choices, but the application to more distant galaxies changes in the same way. Same for the treatment of molecular gas and metallicity. It all comes out in the wash. Our relative distance scale is very precise. Putting an absolute number on it simply requires a lot of calibrating galaxies with accurate, independently measured distances.
Here is the absolute calibration of the BTFR that we obtain:

In constructing this calibrated BTFR, we have relied on distance measurements made or compiled by the Extragalactic Distance Database, which represents the cumulative efforts of Tully and many others to map out the local universe in great detail. We have also benefited from the work of Ponomareva et al, which provides new calibrator galaxies not already in our SPARC sample. Critically, they also measure the flat velocity from rotation curves, which is a huge improvement in accuracy over the more readily available linewidths commonly employed in Tully-Fisher work, but is expensive to obtain so remains the primary observational limitation on this procedure.
Still, we’re in pretty good shape. We now have 50 galaxies with well measured distances as well as the necessary ingredients to construct the BTFR: extended, resolved rotation curves, HI fluxes to measure the gas mass, and Spitzer near-IR data to estimate the stellar mass. This is a huge sample for which to have all of these data simultaneously. Measuring distances to individual galaxies remains challenging and time-consuming hard work that has been done by others. We are not about to second-guess their results, but we can note that they are sensible and remarkably consistent.
There are two primary methods by which the distances we use have been measured. One is Cepheids – the same type of variable stars that Hubble used to measure the distance to spiral nebulae to demonstrate their extragalactic nature. The other is the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) method, which takes advantage of the brightest red giants having nearly the same luminosity. The sample is split nearly 50/50: there are 27 galaxies with a Cepheid distance measurement, and 23 with the TRGB. The two methods (different colored points in the figure) give the same calibration, within the errors, as do the two samples (circles vs. diamonds). There have been plenty of mistakes in the distance scale historically, so this consistency is important. There are many places where things could go wrong: differences between ourselves and Ponomareva, differences between Cepheids and the TRGB as distance indicators, mistakes in the application of either method to individual galaxies… so many opportunities to go wrong, and yet everything is consistent.
Having followed the distance scale problem my entire career, I cannot express how deeply impressive it is that all these different measurements paint a consistent picture. This is a credit to a large community of astronomers who have worked diligently on this problem for what seems like aeons. There is a temptation to dismiss distance scale work as having been wrong in the past, so it can be again. Of course that is true, but it is also true that matters have improved considerably. Forty years ago, it was not surprising when a distance indicator turned out to be wrong, and distances changed by a factor of two. That stopped twenty years ago, thanks in large part to the Hubble Space Telescope, a key goal of which had been to nail down the distance scale. That mission seems largely to have been accomplished, with small differences persisting only at the level that one expects from experimental error. One cannot, for example, make a change to the Cepheid calibration without creating a tension with the TRGB data, or vice-versa: both have to change in concert by the same amount in the same direction. That is unlikely to the point of wishful thinking.
Having nailed down the absolute calibration of the BTFR for galaxies with well-measured distances, we can apply it to other galaxies for which we know the redshift but not the distance. There are nearly 100 suitable galaxies available in the SPARC database. Consistency between them and the calibrator galaxies requires
H0 = 75.1 +/- 2.3 (stat) +/- 1.5 (sys) km/s/Mpc.
This is consistent with the result for the standard luminosity-linewidth version of the Tully-Fisher relation reported by Kourkchi et al. Note also that our statistical (random/experimental) error is larger, but our systematic error is smaller. That’s because we have a much smaller number of galaxies. The method is, in principle, more precise (mostly because rotation curves are more accurate than linewidhts), so there is still a lot to be gained by collecting more data.
Our measurement is also consistent with many other “local” measurements of the distance scale,
but not with “global” measurements. See the nice discussion by Telescoper and the paper from which it comes. A Hubble constant in the 70s is the answer that we’ve consistently gotten for the past 20 years by a wide variety of distinct methods, including direct measurements that are not dependent on lower rungs of the distance ladder, like gravitational lensing and megamasers. These are repeatable experiments. In contrast, as I’ve pointed out before, it is the “global” CMB-fitted value of the Hubble parameter that has steadily diverged from the concordance region that originally established LCDM.
So, where does this leave us? In the past, it was easy to dismiss a tension of this sort as due to some systematic error, because that happened all the time – in the 20th century. That’s not so true anymore. It looks to me like the tension is real.