The Hubble Tension Revisited: Additional Local Distance Ladder Uncertainties

Edvard Mortsell, Ariel Goobar, Joel Johansson, Suhail Dhawan

Published 2021-06-17Version 1

In a recent paper, we argued that systematic uncertainties related to the choice of Cepheid color-luminosity calibration may have a large influence on the tension between the Hubble constant as inferred from distances to Type Ia supernovae and the cosmic microwave background as measured with the Planck satellite. Here, we investigate the impact of other sources of uncertainty in the supernova distance ladder, including Cepheid temperature and metallicity variations, supernova magnitudes and GAIA parallax distances. Excluding Milky Way Cepheids based on parallax calibration uncertainties, for the color excess calibration we obtain $H_0 = 70.8\pm 2.1$ km/s/Mpc, in $1.6\,\sigma$ tension with the Planck value.