HST Fine Guidance Sensor Astrometric Parallaxes for Three Dwarf Novae: SS Aurigae, SS Cygni, and U Geminorum
Thomas E. Harrison, Bernard J. McNamara, Paula Szkody, Barbara J. McAurthur, G. F. Benedict, Arnold R. Klemola, Ronald L. Gilliland
Abstract
We report astrometric parallaxes for three well known dwarf novae obtained using the Fine Guidance Sensors on the Hubble Space Telescope. We found a parallax for SS Aurigae of Pi = 5.00 +/- 0.64 mas, for SS Cygni we found Pi = 6.02 +/- 0.46 mas, and for U Geminorum we obtained Pi = 10.37 +/- 0.50 mas. These represent the first true trigonometric parallaxes of any dwarf novae. We briefly compare these results with previous distance estimates. This program demonstrates that with a very modest amount of HST observing time, the Fine Guidance Sensors can deliver parallaxes of unrivaled precision.
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