TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX OF W51 MAIN/SOUTH

By M. Sato, M. Reid, A. Brunthaler, K. Menten. 2010

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report measurement of the trigonometric parallax of W51 Main/South using the Very Long Baseline Array. We measure a value of 0.185 ± 0.010 mas corresponding to a distance of 5.41+0.31−0.28 kpc. W51 Main/South is a well-known massive star-forming region near the tangent point of the Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way. Our distance to W51 yields an estimate of the distance to the Galactic center of R0 = 8.3 ± 0.46 (statistical) ±1.0 (systematic) kpc by simple geometry. Combining the parallax and proper motion measurements for W51, we obtained the full-space motion of this massive star-forming region. We find W51 is in a nearly circular orbit about the Galactic center. The H2O masers used for our parallax measurements trace four powerful bipolar outflows within a 0.4 pc size region, some of which are associated with dusty molecular hot cores and/or hyper- or ultra-compact H ii regions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffb07eb8b3e2b8ce6b2f576998d8cd8fa23f836c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

IMPROVED ESTIMATES OF THE MILKY WAY’S STELLAR MASS AND STAR FORMATION RATE FROM HIERARCHICAL BAYESIAN META-ANALYSIS (2014, result): “This result is in excellent agreement with other recent measurements of R0 (e.g., Ghez et al. 2008; Vanhollebeke et al. 2009; Sato et al. 2010; Chatzopoulos et al. 2015), with a large enough error to encompass the variation in results among different methods.”
The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, methodology): “VLBI astrometry has provided accurate parallaxes and PMs for over 100 OH, SiO, and methanol masers in high-mass star-formation regions (HMSFRs) in the Galactic disk (Honma et al. 2007, 2012; Reid et al. 2009a, 2014; Sato et al. 2010).”
ATLASGAL - properties of a complete sample of Galactic clumps (2017, unknown): “…(19) Moisés et al. (2011); (20) Pandian et al. (2008); (21) Roman-Duval et al. (2009); (22) Stead & Hoare (2010); (23) Sanna et al. (2009); (24) Sato et al. (2010); (25) Urquhart et al. (2012); (26) Watson et al. (2003); (27) Xu et al. (2011); (28) Zhang et al. (2013); (29) (Nagayama et al.…”
HERSCHEL SURVEY OF GALACTIC OH+, H2O+, AND H3O+: PROBING THE MOLECULAR HYDROGEN FRACTION AND COSMIC-RAY IONIZATION RATE (2014, background): “The W51 region consists of a massive molecular cloud and several active star forming complexes, and has an inferred distance of 5.41 kpc from H2O maser observations (Sato et al. 2010).”
Parallaxes and proper motions of interstellar masers toward the Cygnus X star-forming complex. I. Membership of the Cygnus X region (2011, methodology): “The observation dates were chosen to match the minima and maxima of the sinusoidal parallax signature in right ascension for optimal parallax and proper motion analysis, as discussed in Sato et al. (2010).”
TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAXES OF HIGH MASS STAR FORMING REGIONS: THE STRUCTURE AND KINEMATICS OF THE MILKY WAY (2014, unknown): “…(2014), 3:Reid et al. (2009c), 4:Sato et al. (2014), 5:Sanna et al. (2009), 6:Zhang et al. (2014), 7:Sanna et al. (2014), 8:Immer et al. (2013), 9:Sato et al. (2010a), 10:Xu et al. (2011), 11:Brunthaler et al. (2009), 12:Bartkiewicz et al. (2008), 13:Kurayama et al. (2011), 14:Zhang et al.…”
Microarcsecond Radio Astrometry (2013, background): “…al. 2009; Rygl et al. 2010; Sato et al. 2010a; Moscadelli et al. 2011; Xu et al. 2011; Sanna et al. 2012; Immer et al. 2013) and by the VERA array (Sato et al. 2008, 2010b; Oh et al. 2010; Ando et al. 2011; Honma et al. 2011; Kurayama et al. 2011; Matsumoto et al. 2011; Motogi et al. 2011;…”
The ATLASGAL survey: a catalog of dust condensations in the Galactic plane (2013, background): “This can be explained due to its larger distance of 12 kpc (Gwinn et al. 1992), compared to the other regions, such as W43 and W51, which are located at 6 and 5.4 kpc, respectively (Nguyen Luong et al. 2011; Sato et al. 2010).”
Fundamental Parameters of the Milky Way Galaxy Based on VLBI Astrometry (2012, unknown): “…al. 2009a, (25) Rygl et al. 2010, (26) Rygl et al. 2012, (27) Sakai et al. 2012, (28) Sanna et al. 2009, (29) Sanna et al. 2012, (30) Sato et al. 2008, (31) Sato et al. 2010a, (32) Sato et al. 2010b, (33) Shiozaki et al. 2011, (34) Torres et al. 2007, (35) Torres et al. 2009, (36) Xu et al. 2006,…”
Mass models of the Milky Way (2011, methodology): “(8); (c) we include data from Rygl et al. (2010) and Sato et al. (2010), which were not available when the McMillan & Binney (2010) study was performed; (d) in the interests of simplicity we fix ∆v = 7kms−1, close to the best-fitting values found when ∆v was allowed to vary in the previous study,…”
THE WISE CATALOG OF GALACTIC H ii REGIONS (2013, unknown): “…2009a; (24) Reid et al. 2009c; (25) Rygl et al. 2010; (26) Rygl et al. 2012; (27) Sanna et al. 2009; (28) Sanna et al. 2012; (29) Sato et al. 2008; (30) Sato et al. 2010a; (31) Sato et al. 2010b; (32) Sewilo et al. 2004b; (33) Shiozaki et al. 2011; (34) Urquhart et al. 2012; (35) Urquhart et al.…”
The observed spiral structure of the Milky Way (2014, background): “In addition, the more reliable trigonometric or photometric distances of a number of HII regions or masers have been measured (e.g., Rygl et al. 2010; Sato et al. 2010a; Moisés et al. 2011; Xu et al. 2011, 2013; Russeil et al. 2012; Zhang et al. 2014; Foster & Brunt 2014).”