TRGB distances to galaxies in front of the Virgo cluster

Abstract

Tip of the red giant branch distances are acquired from Hubble Space Telescope images for 16 galaxies to the foreground of the Virgo Cluster. The new distances with 5% accuracy, combined with archival measurements, tightly constrain the near side location of the onset of infall into the Virgo Cluster to be 7.3+-0.3 Mpc from the cluster, reaching within 9 Mpc of the Milky Way. The mass within this turnaround radius about the cluster is 8.3+-0.9 x 10^{14} Msun. Color-magnitude diagrams are provided for galaxies in the study and there is brief discussion of their group affiliations.