The Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program. III: The Distance to NGC 1365 via the Tip of the Red Giant Branch

The Carnegie-Chicago Hubble Program (CCHP) seeks to anchor the distance scale of Type la supernovae via the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) method. Based on deep Hubble Space Telescope ACS/WFC imaging, we present an analysis of the TRGB for the metal-poor halo of NGC 1365, a giant spiral galaxy in the Fornax cluster that was host to the Type la supernova SN 2012fr. We have measured the extinction-corrected TRGB magnitude of NGC 1365 to be F814W = 27.34 +/- 0.03(stat) +/- 0.04(sys) mag. In advance of future direct calibration by Gala, we adopt a provisiona I-band TRGB luminosity set at the Large Magellanic Cloud and find a true distance modulus mu(0) = 31.29 +/- 0.04(stat) +/- 0.06(sys) mag or D = 18.1 +/- 0.3(stat) +/- 0.5(sys) Mpc. This measurement is in excellent agreement with recent Cepheid-based distances to NGC 1365 and reveals no significant difference in the distances derived from stars of Populations I and II for this galaxy. We revisit the error budget for the CCHP path to the Hubble constant based on the analysis presented here, i.e., that for one of the most distant Type la supernova hosts within our Program, and find that a 2.5% measurement is feasible with the current sample of galaxies and TRGB absolute calibration.