A PULSATIONAL APPROACH TO THE LUMINOSITY OF RR LYRAE VARIABLES

We show that the temperature scale of Butler, Dickens, & Epps (1978) for RR Lyrae pulsators appears tightly correlated with the two pulsational parameters, amplitude and period of the pulsation. Application of these ''pulsational'' temperatures to the well-studied Galactic globular clusters M3 and M15 gives for these clusters a reddening E(B - V) = 0.01 and 0.08, respectively. Moreover, we show that pulsational parameters should give rather severe constraints on the visual magnitude of the pulsators. Calibration of a similar relation to pulsator magnitudes as given by Baade-Wesselink (BW) analyses supports this suggestion, though producing M(V) values in systematic disagreement with current evolutionary computations. We discuss the problem, showing that BW results can be reconciled with the current evolutionary scenario only assuming a value of the original He as low as Y = 0.19 plus a systematic error in the temperature scale. Conversely, one may save the evolutionary scenario with Y = 0.23 by assuming a systematic error in BW magnitudes.