A cosmological intercept tension in local distance ladders
Abstract
The Hubble tension motivates direct tests of the internal consistency of the local distance ladder. We perform forward and backward consistency checks between Type Ia supernovae in Cepheid host galaxies and the Hubble-flow supernova sample using Pantheon+ data. Within flat ΛCDM, we impose Planck-CMB priors on one sample, infer the supernova absolute-magnitude calibration, and propagate it to the other sample to recover the Hubble constant, which should match the input value if the second and third rungs of the distance ladder align perfectly. We examine the impact of host-galaxy peculiar velocities using redshift corrections based on the Manticore-Local reconstruction. These corrections shift the recovered H0 from 74.30+1.18−1.20 to 71.37+1.23−1.18 km s−1Mpc−1 in the forward analysis and from 60.83+0.98−0.97 to 63.25+0.95−0.93 km s−1Mpc−1 in the backward analysis, bringing both results closer to the input CMB constraint. Comparing the cosmological intercepts of the magnitude-redshift relation inferred from two rungs of the distance ladder before and after peculiar-velocity corrections, we find that the significance of the discrepancy decreases from 6.8σ to 3.9σ in the forward check and from 7.3σ to 4.3σ in the backward check. Peculiar-velocity corrections therefore partially alleviate the intercept tension, while the residual discrepancy is further cut in half by volumetric bias down to ∼1.7σ. Our results highlight the importance of local velocity modeling and motivate further tests of sample selection and calibration systematics in assessing distance-ladder consistency.
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BibTeX
@misc{dong2026cosmological,
title = {{A cosmological intercept tension in local distance ladders}},
author = {Haotian Dong and Marek Biesiada and Zhoujian Cao and Shao-Jiang Wang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.31181},
eprint = {2610.31181},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31181},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A cosmological intercept tension in local distance ladders
AU - Haotian Dong
AU - Marek Biesiada
AU - Zhoujian Cao
AU - Shao-Jiang Wang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/29
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.31181
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31181
AB - The Hubble tension motivates direct tests of the internal consistency of the local distance ladder. We perform forward and backward consistency checks between Type Ia supernovae in Cepheid host galaxies and the Hubble-flow supernova sample using Pantheon+ data. Within flat ΛCDM, we impose Planck-CMB priors on one sample, infer the supernova absolute-magnitude calibration, and propagate it to the other sample to recover the Hubble constant, which should match the input value if the second and third rungs of the distance ladder align perfectly. We examine the impact of host-galaxy peculiar velocities using redshift corrections based on the Manticore-Local reconstruction. These corrections shift the recovered H_0 from 74.30^+1.18_−1.20 to 71.37^+1.23_−1.18 km s^−1Mpc^−1 in the forward analysis and from 60.83^+0.98_−0.97 to 63.25^+0.95_−0.93 km s^−1Mpc^−1 in the backward analysis, bringing both results closer to the input CMB constraint. Comparing the cosmological intercepts of the magnitude-redshift relation inferred from two rungs of the distance ladder before and after peculiar-velocity corrections, we find that the significance of the discrepancy decreases from 6.8σ to 3.9σ in the forward check and from 7.3σ to 4.3σ in the backward check. Peculiar-velocity corrections therefore partially alleviate the intercept tension, while the residual discrepancy is further cut in half by volumetric bias down to ∼1.7σ. Our results highlight the importance of local velocity modeling and motivate further tests of sample selection and calibration systematics in assessing distance-ladder consistency.
ER -