Towards an Understanding of the Dynamics of the Milky Way

2005

Determination of outer rotation curve using Galactic masers The rotation curve of the Galaxy is poorly determined outside the solar circle (e.g. Honma & Sofue 1997). The situation makes difficult to derive the dynamical mass of the Galaxy, which is essential for inferring the amount of Galactic dark gravitating matter. We selected Galactic masers in this study since they distributed over the whole Galaxy. Moreover, they can observed with VLBI at extremely high angular resolution, allowing a measurement of the annual parallax, and thus the source’s distance, and its proper motion due to Galactic rotation with phase referencing VLBI astrometric observation. We have already performed phase-ref…