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On the Rotation Speed of the Milky Way Determined from H i Emission

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Abstract

  • The circular rotation speed of the Milky Way at the solar radius, T0, has been estimated to be 220 km s-1 by fitting the maximum velocity of H i emission as a function of Galactic longitude. This result is in tension with a recent estimate of T0 = 240 km s-1, based on Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) parallaxes and proper motions from the BeSSeL and VERA surveys for large numbers of high-mass star-forming regions across the Milky Way. We find that the rotation curve best fitted to the VLBI data is slightly curved, and that this curvature results in a biased estimate of T0 from the H i data when a flat rotation curve is assumed. This relieves the tension between the methods and favors T0 = 240 km s-1.

Publication Date

  • 2016

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