TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX OF W51 MAIN/SOUTH
We report measurement of the trigonometric parallax of W51 Main/South using the Very Long Baseline Array. We measure a value of 0.185 ± 0.010 mas corresponding to a distance of 5.41+0.31 –0.28 kpc. W51 Main/South is a well-known massive star-forming region near the tangent point of the Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way. Our distance to W51 yields an estimate of the distance to the Galactic center of R 0 = 8.3 ± 0.46 (statistical) ±1.0 (systematic) kpc by simple geometry. Combining the parallax and proper motion measurements for W51, we obtained the full-space motion of this massive star-forming region. We find W51 is in a nearly circular orbit about the Galactic center. The H2O masers used for our parallax measurements trace four powerful bipolar outflows within a 0.4 pc size region, some of which are associated with dusty molecular hot cores and/or hyper- or ultra-compact H II regions.