A Parallactic Distance of 389 +24/-21 parsecs to the Orion Nebula Cluster from Very Long Baseline Array Observations

Abstract

We determine the parallax and proper motion of the flaring, non-thermal radio star GMR A, a member of the Orion Nebula Cluster, using Very Long Baseline Array observations. Based on the parallax, we measure a distance of 389 +24/-21 parsecs to the source. Our measurement places the Orion Nebula Cluster considerably closer than the canonical distance of 480 +/- 80 parsecs determined by Genzel et al. (1981). A change of this magnitude in distance lowers the luminosities of the stars in the cluster by a factor of ~ 1.5. We briefly discuss two effects of this change--an increase in the age spread of the pre-main sequence stars and better agreement between the zero-age main-sequence and the temperatures and luminosities of massive stars.

10 pages, 4 figures, emulateapj, accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (2)

• Pulsar Parallaxes at 5 GHz with the Very Long Baseline Array
• The distance to the Orion Nebula Cluster

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