English

A Milliarcsecond-accurate Position for Sagittarius A*

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2022-11-30 v3 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

The absolute position of Sgr A*, the compact radio source at the center of the Milky Way, had been uncertain by several tens of milliarcseconds. Here we report improved astrometric measurements of the absolute position and proper motion of Sgr A*. Three epochs of phase-referencing observations were conducted with the Very Long Baseline Array for Sgr A* at 22 and 43 GHz in 2019 and 2020. Using extragalactic radio sources with submilliarcsecond-accurate positions as reference, we determined the absolute position of Sgr A* at a reference epoch 2020.0 to be at α\alpha(J2000) = 17h45m40.s032863 ± 0.s00001617^{\rm h} 45^{\rm m}40.^{\rm s}032863~\pm~0.^{\rm s}000016 and δ\delta(J2000) = 290028.24260 ± 0.00047-29^{\circ} 00^{\prime} 28.^{''}24260~\pm~0.^{''}00047, with an updated proper motion 3.152 ± 0.011-3.152~\pm~0.011 and 5.586 ± 0.006-5.586~\pm~0.006 mas yr1^{-1} in the easterly and northerly directions, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.03390,
  title  = {A Milliarcsecond-accurate Position for Sagittarius A*},
  author = {Shuangjing Xu and Bo Zhang and Mark J. Reid and Xingwu Zheng and Guangli Wang and Taehyun Jung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03390},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

9 pages, 2 figures, accepted by ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-28T02:59:08.664Z