Water Maser Motions in W3(OH) and a Determination of Its Distance

By K. Hachisuka, A. Brunthaler, K. Menten, M. J. Reid, H. Imai, Yoshiaki Hagiwara, Makoto Miyoshi, S. Horiuchi, T. Sasao. 2005

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We report phase-referencing VLBA observations of H2O masers near the star-forming region W3(OH) to measure their parallax and absolute proper motions. The measured annual parallax is 0.489 ± 0.017 mas (2.04 ± 0.07 kpc), where the error is dominated by a systematic atmospheric contribution. This distance is consistent with photometric distances from previous observations and with the distance determined from CH3OH maser astrometry presented in a related paper. We also find that the source driving the H2O outflow, the "TW-object," moves with a three-dimensional velocity of >7 km s-1 relative to the ultracompact H II region W3(OH).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c49a2677487c0b7c0cff52dba94d74153a22d10e

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Citations in the corpus

TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAXES OF MASSIVE STAR-FORMING REGIONS. I. S 252 & G232.6+1.0 (2008, background): “The accuracy of this transformation is typically better than a few km s−1 for slowly expanding methanol masers (Xu et al. 2006b), but can be of order 10 km s−1 for the rapidly expanding H2O masers (Hachisuka et al. 2006).”
The distance to the Orion Nebula (2007, background): “Recently, VLBA observations of methanol ad water masers have yielded trigonometric parallax distances for the star-forming region W3OH in the Perseus spiral arm of the Milky Way of 2.0 kpc with ≈ 2% accuracy (Xu et al. 2006; Hachisuka et al. 2006).”
Distance to Orion KL Measured with VERA (2007, methodology): “With recent highly precise VLBI astrometry, annual parallaxes have been successfully measured for the Galactic CH3OH maser sources at the 12 GHz band (Xu et al. 2006) and H2O maser sources at the 22 GHz band (Kurayama et al. 2005; Hachisuka et al. 2006) with the NRAO Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).”
TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAXES OF MASSIVE STAR-FORMING REGIONS. VI. GALACTIC STRUCTURE, FUNDAMENTAL PARAMETERS, AND NONCIRCULAR MOTIONS (2009, methodology): “We are measuring trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions of sources of maser emission associated with high-mass star forming regions (HMSFRs), using the National Ra- dio Astronomy Observatory’s 1 Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and the Japanese VLBI Exploration of Radio Astronomy (VERA) project.”
Parallaxes and proper motions of interstellar masers toward the Cygnus X star-forming complex. I. Membership of the Cygnus X region (2011, methodology): “…produce robust distance measurements: for ex- ample, the distance to W3(OH), measured with both 12.2 GHz methanol (Xu et al. 2006) and 22 GHz water (Hachisuka et al. 2006) masers, yielded the same number, whereas the 6.7 GHz maser distances (Rygl et al. 2010) also agreed with the VERA water…”
TADPOL: A 1.3 mm SURVEY OF DUST POLARIZATION IN STAR-FORMING CORES AND REGIONS (2013, background): “H2O maser parallax measurements place the complex at a distance of 2.04 kpc (Hachisuka et al. 2006).”
Microarcsecond Radio Astrometry (2013, background): “One of the first high-precision VLBA parallaxes was for the massive star forming region W3(OH); Xu et al. (2006) found a distance of 1.95±0.04 kpc, confirmed by Hachisuka et al. (2006).”
HERSCHEL SURVEY OF GALACTIC OH+, H2O+, AND H3O+: PROBING THE MOLECULAR HYDROGEN FRACTION AND COSMIC-RAY IONIZATION RATE (2014, methodology): “Multiepoch VLBA observations of water masers toward both sources have been used to determine distances of 2.04±0.07 kpc (Hachisuka et al. 2006) and 1.83±0.14 kpc (Imai et al. 2000) for W3(OH) and W3 IRS5, respectively.”
TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAXES OF HIGH MASS STAR FORMING REGIONS: THE STRUCTURE AND KINEMATICS OF THE MILKY WAY (2014, unknown): “…29:Hirota et al. (2008), 30:Moscadelli et al. (2009), 31:Moellenbrock, Claussen & Goss (2009), 32:Sato et al. (2008), 33:Xu et al. (2006), 34:Hachisuka et al. (2006), 35:Asaki et al. (2010), 36:Hachisuka et al. (2009), 37:Hachisuka et al. (2014), 38:Honma et al. (2011), 39:Niinuma et al.…”
The Bar and Spiral Structure Legacy (BeSSeL) Survey: Mapping the Milky Way with VLBI Astrometry† (2011, unknown): “Two independent parallax measurements with the VLBA of bright methanol (Xu et al. 2006) and water (Hachisuka et al. 2006) masers yielded consistent distance estimates of 1.95 ± 0.04 and 2.04 ± 0.07 kpc.”
Astrometry of H2O Masers in Nearby Star-Forming Regions with VERA II SVS 13 in NGC 1333 (2008, methodology): “…out for the Galactic CH3OH and H2O maser source W 3(OH) with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which yielded a distance of 2.0 kpc from the Sun with uncertainties of about 2%, based on the annual parallax method (Xu et al. 2006; Hachisuka et al. 2006).”
VLBA Determination of the Distance to Nearby Star-forming Regions. II. Hubble 4 and HDE 283572 in Taurus (2007, methodology): “…such observations have proven capable of measuring the trigonometric parallax of sources within a few kiloparsecs of the Sun with a precision of a few percent (Brisken et al. 2000, 2002; Loinard et al. 2005, 2007; Xu et al. 2006; Hachisuka et al. 2006; Hirota et al. 2007; Sandstrom et al. 2007).”