THE TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX OF CYGNUS X-1

We report a direct and accurate measurement of the distance to the X-ray binary Cygnus X-1, which contains the first black hole to be discovered. The distance of 1.86[superscript +0.12] [subscript - 0.11] kpc was obtained from a trigonometric parallax measurement using the Very Long Baseline Array....

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Reid, Mark J. (Author), McClintock, Jeffrey E. (Author), Narayan, Ramesh (Author), Gou, Lijun (Author), Orosz, Jerome A. (Author), Remillard, Ronald A (Author)
Other Authors: MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (Contributor), Remillard, Ronald Alan (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing, 2015-02-26T18:22:04Z.
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Online Access:Get fulltext
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100 1 0 |a Reid, Mark J.  |e author 
100 1 0 |a MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research  |e contributor 
100 1 0 |a Remillard, Ronald Alan  |e contributor 
700 1 0 |a McClintock, Jeffrey E.  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Narayan, Ramesh  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Gou, Lijun  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Orosz, Jerome A.  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Remillard, Ronald A  |e author 
245 0 0 |a THE TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX OF CYGNUS X-1 
260 |b IOP Publishing,   |c 2015-02-26T18:22:04Z. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/95668 
520 |a We report a direct and accurate measurement of the distance to the X-ray binary Cygnus X-1, which contains the first black hole to be discovered. The distance of 1.86[superscript +0.12] [subscript - 0.11] kpc was obtained from a trigonometric parallax measurement using the Very Long Baseline Array. The position measurements are also sensitive to the 5.6 day binary orbit and we determine the orbit to be clockwise on the sky. We also measured the proper motion of Cygnus X-1 which, when coupled to the distance and Doppler shift, gives the three-dimensional space motion of the system. When corrected for differential Galactic rotation, the non-circular (peculiar) motion of the binary is only about 21 km s[superscript -1], indicating that the binary did not experience a large "kick" at formation. 
520 |a National Science Foundation (U.S.) 
546 |a en_US 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Astrophysical Journal