Galactic Center: an Improved Astrometric Reference Frame for Stellar Orbits Around the Supermassive Black Hole Shoko Sakai,1 Jessica R
Draft version January 28, 2019 Typeset using LATEX twocolumn style in AASTeX62 The Galactic Center: An Improved Astrometric Reference Frame for Stellar Orbits around the Supermassive Black Hole Shoko Sakai,1 Jessica R. Lu,2 Andrea Ghez,1 Siyao Jia,2 Tuan Do,1 Gunther Witzel,1 Abhimat K. Gautam,1 Aurelien Hees,3, 1 E. Becklin,1 K. Matthews,4 and M. W. Hosek Jr.5 1UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1547, USA 2Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA 3SYRTE, Observatoire de Paris, Universit´ePSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Universit´e,LNE, 61 avenue de l’Observatoire 75014 Paris 4Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, MC 249-17, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA 5Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA (Received; Revised; Accepted) Submitted to ApJ ABSTRACT Precision measurements of the stars in short-period orbits around the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center are now being used to constrain general relativistic effects, such as the gravitational redshift and periapse precession. One of the largest systematic uncertainties in the measured orbits has been errors in the astrometric reference frame, which is derived from seven infrared-bright stars associated with SiO masers that have extremely accurate radio positions, measured in the Sgr A*-rest frame. We have improved the astrometric reference frame within 1400 of the Galactic Center by a factor of 2.5 in position and a factor of 5 in proper motion. In the new reference frame, Sgr A* is localized to within a position of 0.645 mas and proper motion of 0.03 mas yr−1.
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