• Water Maser Survey towards off-plane O-rich AGBs around the orbital plane of the Sagittarius Stellar Stream

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: A 22 GHz water maser survey was conducted towards 178 O-rich AGB stars with the aim of identifying maser emission associated with the Sagittarius stellar stream. In this survey, maser emissions were detected in 21 targets, of which 20 were new detections. We studied the Galactic distributions of H2O and SiO maser-traced AGBs towards the Sgr orbital plane, and found an elongated structure towards the (l, b)~(340, 40) direction. In order to verify its association with the Sagittarius tidal stream, we further studied the 3D motions of these sources, but found, kinematically, these maser-traced AGBs are still Galactic disc sources rather than Stream debris. In addition, we found a remarkable outward motion, ~50 km/s away from the Galactic center of these maser-traced AGBs, but with no systermatic lag of rotational speed which were reported in 2000 for solar neighborhood Miras.

  • Light Deflection under the Gravitational Field of Jupiter -- Testing General Relativity

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: We measured the relative positions between two pairs of compact extragalactic sources (CESs), J1925-2219 \& J1923-2104 (C1--C2) and J1925-2219 \& J1928-2035 (C1--C3) on 2020 October 23--25 and 2021 February 5 (totaling four epochs), respectively, using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) at 15 GHz. Accounting for the deflection angle dominated by Jupiter, as well as the contributions from the Sun, planets other than Earth, the Moon and Ganymede (the most massive of the solar system's moons), our theoretical calculations predict that the dynamical ranges of the relative positions across four epochs in R.A. of the C1--C2 pair and C1--C3 pair are 841.2 and 1127.9 $\mu$as, respectively. The formal accuracy in R.A. is about 20 $\mu$as, but the error in Decl. is poor. The measured standard deviations of the relative positions across the four epochs are 51.0 and 29.7 $\mu$as in R.A. for C1--C2 and C1--C3, respectively. These values indicate that the accuracy of the post-Newtonian relativistic parameter, $\gamma$, is $\sim 0.061$ for C1--C2 and $\sim 0.026$ for C1--C3. Combining the two CES pairs, the measured value of $\gamma$ is $0.984 \pm 0.037$, which is comparable to the latest published results for Jupiter as a gravitational lens reported by Fomalont \& Kopeikin, i.e., $1.01 \pm 0.03$.