Trigonometric Parallaxes of 6.7 GHz Methanol Masers

Understand

Emission from the 6.7 GHz methanol maser transition is very strong, is relatively stable, has small internal motions, and is observed toward numerous massive star-forming regions in the Galaxy.

• Our goal is to perform high-precision astrometry using this maser transition to obtain accurate distances to their host regions.
• Eight strong masers were observed during five epochs of VLBI observations with the European VLBI Network between 2006 June, and 2008 March.
• We report trigonometric parallaxes for five star-forming regions, with accuracies as good as $\sim22 \mathrm{\mu}$as.