The Araucaria Project Establishes the Most Precise Benchmark for Cosmic Distances

In the last 20 years, over the course of the Araucaria project, we have studied 20 very special eclipsing binary systems in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Based on these systems and our newly calibrated surface brightness–colour relation we have measured a distance to the LMC that is accurate to 1%. This is currently the best benchmark for cosmic distances and it will therefore impact several fields of astrophysics. In particular, it has allowed a determination of the Hubble constant with a precision of 1.9%.
Published in The Messenger vol. 179, pp. 24-28, March 2020.