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Southern Hemisphere Maser Astrometry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2024

Simon Ellingsen*
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania, Australia
Mark Reid
Affiliation:
Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA
Karl Menten
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institut für Radionastronomie, Germany
Lucas Hyland
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania, Australia
Jayender Kumar
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania, Australia
Gabor Oroz
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania, Australia Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, The Netherlands
Stuart Weston
Affiliation:
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Richard Dodson
Affiliation:
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Australia
Maria Rioja
Affiliation:
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, Australia
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Abstract

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Many astrophysical phenomena can only be studied in detail for objects in our galaxy, the Milly Way, but we know much more about the structure of thousands of nearby galaxies than we do about our own Galaxy. Accurate distance measurements in the Milky Way underpin our ability to understand a wide range of astrophysical phenomena and this requires observations from both the northern and southern hemisphere. Our ability to measure accurate parallaxes to southern masers has been hampered a range of factors, in particular the absence of a dedicated, homogeneous VLBI array in the south. We have recently made significant advances in astrometric calibration techniques which allow us to achieve trigonometric parallax accuracies of around 10 micro-arcseconds (μas) for 6.7 GHz methanol masers with a hetrogeneous array of 4 antennas. We outline the details of this new “multiview” technique and present the first trigonometric parallax measurements that utilise this approach.

Type
Contributed Paper
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Astronomical Union

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