A new estimate of the Local Standard of Rest from data on young Galactic objects

Abstract

To estimate the peculiar velocity of the Sun with respect to the Local Standard of Rest (LSR), we used young objects in the Solar neighborhood with distance measurement errors within 10%-15%. These objects were the nearest Hipparcos stars of spectral classes O--B2.5, masers with trigonometric parallaxes measured by means of VLBI, and two samples of the youngest and middle-aged Cepheids. The most significant component of motion of all these stars is induced by the spiral density wave. As a result of using all these samples and taking into account the differential Galactic rotation, as well as the influence of the spiral density wave, we obtained the following components of the vector of the peculiar velocity of the Sun with respect to the LSR: (U_o,V_o,W_o)_{LSR}= (6.0,10.6,6.5)+/-(0.5,0.8,0.3) km s^{-1}. We have found that the Solar velocity components (U_o)_{LSR} and (V_o)_{LSR} are very sensitive to the Solar radial phase \chi_o in the spiral density wave.