0000000001053931
AUTHOR
Andreas Brunthaler
Water Maser Motions in W3(OH) and a Determination of Its Distance
We report phase-referencing VLBA observations of H2O masers near the star-forming region W3(OH) to measure their parallax and absolute proper motions. The measured annual parallax is 0.489 +/- 0.017 milli-arcseconds (2.04 +/- 0.07 kpc), where the error is dominated by a systematic atmospheric contribution. This distance is consistent with photometric distances from previous observations and with the distance determined from CH3OH maser astrometry presented in a related paper. We also find that the source driving the H2O outflow, the ``TW-object'', moves with a 3-dimensional velocity of > 7 km/s relative to the ultracompact HII region W3(OH).
The jet of the Low Luminosity AGN of M81
In this contribution, we summarize our main results of a big campaign of global VLBI observations of the AGN in M81 (M81*) phase-referenced to the radio supernova SN 1993J. Thanks to the precise multi-epoch and multi-frequency astrometry, we have determined the normalized core-shift of the relativistic jet of M81* and estimated both the magnetic field and the particle density at the jet base. We have also found evidence of jet precession in M81* coming from the systematic time evolution of the jet orientation correlated with changes in the overall flux density.