Distance and Proper Motion Measurement of the Red Supergiant, S Persei, with VLBI H2O Maser Astrometry

TL;DR

This study used VLBI to measure the distance and motion of the red supergiant S Persei via H2O maser astrometry, revealing its precise location and non-circular galactic motion, which informs models of spiral arm dynamics.

Contribution

First VLBI measurement of S Persei's parallax and proper motion, providing insights into its galactic orbit and spiral arm interactions.

Findings

Distance to S Persei is approximately 2.42 kpc.

S Persei exhibits a non-circular motion of about 15 km/s.

The non-circular motion may be due to spiral arm dynamics or OB association shuffling.

Abstract

We have conducted VLBA phase-referencing monitoring of H2O masers around the red supergiant, S Persei, for six years. We have fitted maser motions to a simple expanding-shell model with a common annual parallax and stellar proper motion, and obtained the annual parallax as 0.413+/-0.017 mas, and the stellar proper motion as (-0.49+/-0.23 mas/yr, -1.19+/-0.20 mas/yr) in right ascension and declination, respectively. The obtained annual parallax corresponds to the trigonometric distance of 2.42+0.11-0.09 kpc. Assuming the Galactocentric distance of the Sun of 8.5 kpc, the circular rotational velocity of the LSR at the distance of the Sun of 220 km/s, and a flat Galactic rotation curve, S Persei is suggested to have a non-circular motion deviating from the Galactic circular rotation for 15 km/s, which is mainly dominated by the anti rotation direction component of 12.9+/-2.9 km/s. This red supergiant is thought to belong to the OB association, Per OB1, so that this non-circular motion is representative of a motion of the OB association in the Milky Way. This non-circular motion is somewhat larger than that explained by the standard density-wave theory for a spiral galaxy, and is attributed to either a cluster shuffling of the OB association, or to non-linear interactions between non-stationary spiral arms and multi-phase interstellar media. The latter comes from a new view of a spiral arm formation in the Milky Way suggested by recent large N-body/smoothed particle hydrodynamics numerical simulations.