Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Has Blending Compromised Cepheid-Based Determinations of the
  Extragalactic Distance Scale?   We examine the suggestion that half of the HST Key Project- and
Sandage/Saha-observed galaxies have had their distances systematically
underestimated, by 0.1-0.3 mag in the distance modulus, due to the
underappreciated influence of stellar profile blending on the WFC chips. The
signature of such an effect would be a systematic trend in (i) the Type Ia
supernovae corrected peak luminosity and (ii) the Tully-Fisher residuals, with
increasing calibrator distance, and (iii) a differential offset between PC and
WFC distance moduli, within the same galaxy. The absence of a trend would be
expected if blending were negligible (as has been inherently assumed in the
analyses of the aforementioned teams). We adopt a functional form for the
predicted influence of blending that is consistent with the models of Mochejska
et al. and Stanek & Udalski, and demonstrate that the expected correlation with
distance predicted by these studies is not supported by the data. We conclude
that the Cepheid-based extragalactic distance scale has not been severely
compromised by the neglect of blending.

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The categories of this paper are: adap-org
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The categories of this paper are: eess
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The categories of this paper are: q-fin
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
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The categories of this paper are: acc-phys
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The categories of this paper are: hep-th
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
1
The categories of this paper are: cs
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
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The categories of this paper are: supr-con
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The categories of this paper are: econ
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The categories of this paper are: solv-int
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The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
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The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
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The categories of this paper are: funct-an