A review of the distance and structure of the Large Magellanic Cloud

The average of 14 recent measurements of the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) implies a true modulus of 18.50 +/- 0.02 mag, and demonstrates a trend in the past 2 years of convergence toward a standard value. The distance indicators reviewed are the red clump, the tip of the red giant branch, Cepheid, RR Lyrae, and Mira variable stars, cluster main-sequence fitting, supernova 1987A, and eclipsing binaries. The eclipsing binaries yield a consistent distance on average; however, the internal scatter is twice as large as the average measurement error. I discuss parameters of LMC structure that pertain to distance indicators, and speculate that warps discovered using the color of the clump are not really warps. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.