The Vela Pulsar’s Proper Motion and Parallax Derived from VLBI Observations

By Richard Dodson, D. Legge, John E. Reynolds, P. McCulloch. 2003

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The Vela pulsar is the brightest pulsar at radio wavelengths. It was the object that told us (via its glitching) that pulsars were solid rotating bodies not oscillating ones. Along with the Crab pulsar, is it the source of many of the models of pulsar behavior. Therefore it is of vital importance to know how far away it is and its origin. The proper motion and parallax for the Vela pulsar have been derived from 2.3 and 8.4 GHz very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations. The data span 6.8 years and consist of 11 epochs. We find a proper motion of μα cos δ = -49.68 ± 0.06, μδ = 29.9 ± 0.1 mas yr-1 and a parallax of 3.5 ± 0.2 mas, which is equivalent to a distance of 287 pc. When we subtract out the Galactic rotation and solar peculiar velocity, we find μ* = 45 ± 1.3 mas yr-1 with a position angle of 301° ± 1.°8 which implies that the proper motion has a small but significant offset from the X-ray nebula's symmetry axis.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

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Citations in the corpus

• Evidence for alignment of the rotation and velocity vectors in pulsars. II. Further data and emission heights (2005, background): “Helfand et al. (2001) then note that the position angles of the torus and pulsar spin axes are within 10◦ of the proper motion vector of 301◦ obtained by Dodson et al. (2003).”
• Microarcsecond Radio Astrometry (2013, result): “Similar studies have been performed by others (Dodson et al. 2003; Ng et al. 2007; Chatterjee et al. 2009; Bietenholz et al. 2013).”
• A statistical study of 233 pulsar proper motions (2005, unknown): “…14 33(9) References: (1) Brisken et al. (2002), (2) van Straten et al. (2001), (3) Caraveo et al. (1996), (4) Brisken et al. (2003b), (5) Gwinn et al. (1986), (6) Dodson et al. (2003), (7) Chatterjee et al. (2001), (8) Wolszczan et al. (2000), (9) Bailes et al. (1990b), (10) Camilo et al.…”
• Minimal Cooling of Neutron Stars: A New Paradigm (2004, background): “The kinematic age of the SNR is from Aschenbach et al. (1995) and the VLBI interferometric distance measurement of 250 pc is due to Dodson et al. (2003).”
• Fitting Pulsar Wind Tori (2003, methodology): “Similarly, for Vela, we compare with the new radio interferometric proper motion of Dodson et al. (2003) at PM ¼ 302 4 , which has both higher astrometric accuracy and a corrected treatment of Galactic rotation effects from earlier optical estimates.”
• NEUTRINO EMISSION FROM COOPER PAIRS AND MINIMAL COOLING OF NEUTRON STARS (2009, background): “Correcting this distance to 300 pcs (the VLBI parallax distance of Dodson et al. 2003) gives us an age of 5400-16000 yrs as emphasized by Tsuruta et al. (2009).”