Astrometry of Galactic Star-Forming Region Onsala 1 with VERA: Estimation of Angular Velocity of Galactic Rotation at Sun

TL;DR

This study used VLBI astrometry to measure the distance and proper motion of the Onsala 1 star-forming region, leading to a new estimate of the Galactic rotation velocity at the Sun, which is higher than the traditional value.

Contribution

The paper provides a precise measurement of the Galactic rotation velocity at the Sun using VLBI astrometry of ON1, challenging the standard IAU value.

Findings

Measured a parallax of 0.404 mas for ON1

Estimated the Galactic rotation velocity at Sun as 28.7 km/s/kpc

Found the value larger than the IAU standard but consistent with recent VLBI results.

Abstract

We conducted the astrometry of H2O masers in the Galactic star-forming region Onsala 1 (ON1) with VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry (VERA). We measured a trigonometric parallax of 0.404+/-0.017 mas, corresponding to a distance of 2.47+/-0.11 kpc. ON1 is appeared to be located near the tangent point at the Galactic longitude of 69.54 deg. We estimate the angular velocity of the Galactic rotation at Sun, the ratio of the distance from Sun to the Galactic center and the Galactic rotation velocity at Sun, to be 28.7+/-1.3 km/s/kpc using the measured distance and proper motion of ON1. This value is larger than the IAU recommended value of 25.9 km/s/kpc, but consistent with other results recently obtained with the VLBI technique.