Determination of the Hubble Constant

Abstract

Recent developments in the determination of H0 are reviewed in the context of the 3 following questions: 1) What is required to measure an accurate value of H0? Given the wide range of H0 values quoted in the current literature, is there any evidence that the situation has changed very much at all in the last couple of decades? And 3), is a measurement of H0 accurate to 10% feasible with current observational tools? Recent results on the extragalactic distance scale are extremely encouraging. A large number of independent methods (including the latest type Ia supernova calibration by Sandage et al. 1996) appear to be converging on a value of H0 in the range of 60 to 80 km/sec/Mpc. The factor-of-two discrepancy in H0 appears to be behind us. However, all of these results underscore the importance of reducing remaining uncertainties in the Cepheid distance scale (e.g., reddening and metallicity). A summary of recent results from the HST H0 Key Project is given. At the present time, a value of H0=73 +/- 6 (statistical) +/- 8 (systematic) km/sec/Mpc is obtained. This value is based on the Cepheid calibration of several different methods including the Tully-Fisher relation, type Ia supernovae, a calibration of distant clusters tied to the Fornax cluster, and direct Cepheid distances out to about 20 Mpc. The uncertainty in this estimate will decrease as further Cepheid calibrators become available over the course of the Key Project; the goal is to measure H0 to an accuracy of 10%.