THE TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX OF CYGNUS X-1

By M. J. Reid, J. E. McClintock, Ramesh Narayan, Lijun Gou, Ronald A. Remillard, J. Orosz. 2011

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We report a direct and accurate measurement of the distance to the X-ray binary Cygnus X-1, which contains the first black hole to be discovered. The distance of 1.86+0.12− 0.11 kpc was obtained from a trigonometric parallax measurement using the Very Long Baseline Array. The position measurements are also sensitive to the 5.6 day binary orbit and we determine the orbit to be clockwise on the sky. We also measured the proper motion of Cygnus X-1 which, when coupled to the distance and Doppler shift, gives the three-dimensional space motion of the system. When corrected for differential Galactic rotation, the non-circular (peculiar) motion of the binary is only about 21 km s−1, indicating that the binary did not experience a large “kick” at formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df2fb5a7275221fbac222ab2781f975baa53a855

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Citations in the corpus

X-ray variability of 104 active galactic nuclei - XMM-Newton power-spectrum density profiles (2012, unknown): “The luminosityLbol was derived assuming a distance of D= 1.86± 0.12 kpc (Reid et al., 2011).”
Parallaxes and proper motions of interstellar masers toward the Cygnus X star-forming complex. I. Membership of the Cygnus X region (2011, unknown): “(Moscadelli et al. 2009), L 1206 (Rygl et al. 2010), L 1448C (Hirota et al. 2011), Cygnus X-1 (located∼7◦ away from the Cygnus X region, Reid et al. 2011), ON 1 (Rygl et al. 2010; Nagayama et al. 2011), and G 59.7+01 (Xu et al. 2009a).”
THE EXTREME SPIN OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1 (2011, methodology): “INTRODUCTION In our two companion papers (Reid et al. 2011; Orosz et al. 2011), we report accurate measurements of the distance, blak hole mass and orbital inclination angle for the black-hole binary system Cygnus X-1.”
A PARALLAX DISTANCE TO THE MICROQUASAR GRS 1915+105 AND A REVISED ESTIMATE OF ITS BLACK HOLE MASS (2014, background): “Unlike the black hole binaries V404 Cyg (Miller-Jones et al. 2009) and Cyg X-1 (Reid et al. 2011), for which measurements of trigonometric parallax were relatively straightforward, GRS 1915+105 is a difficult target for several reasons.”
WATCHDOG: A COMPREHENSIVE ALL-SKY DATABASE OF GALACTIC BLACK HOLE X-RAY BINARIES (2015, methodology): “The large range of these mass estimates is mainly due to the large uncertainty in distance to the source (Reid et al. 2011).”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, methodology): “This situation has recently improved drastically: VLBA astrometry has made it possible to determine parallax distances for some black holes (e.g. V404 Cyg and Cyg X-1; [290, 291]), reducing errors to a very small fraction of the distance value.”
Black Hole Spin via Continuum Fitting and the Role of Spin in Powering Transient Jets (2013, background): “In addition to the continuum-ﬁtting spin data in Table 1, Gierli´nski et al. (2001) provide preliminary estimates for the spins of LMC X-1 and GRO J1655–50, Kolehmainen & Done (2010) report a hard upper limit of a ∗ < 0 .”
Microarcsecond Radio Astrometry (2013, methodology): “Recently a trigonometric parallax measurement with the VLBA yielded a distance of 1.86±0.12 kpc (Reid et al. 2011).”
COMPACT BINARY MERGER RATES: COMPARISON WITH LIGO/VIRGO UPPER LIMITS (2015, background): “Natal Kick From 3D Velocity: Cyg X-1 Wong et al. (2012) have studied evolution and dynamics of 3D motion of Cyg X-1 based on parallax measurement of Reid et al. (2011).”
THE MASS OF THE BLACK HOLE IN CYGNUS X-1 (2011, methodology): “In this paper, we use a distance from a trigonometric parallax measurement for Cygnus X-1 (Reid et al. 2011), which is accurate to ±6%, and previously published optical data to build a complete dynamical model of the Cygnus X-1 binary system.”