Abstract
Distance measurements for extragalactic objects are a fundamental problem in astronomy1,2 and cosmology3,4. In the era of precision cosmology, we urgently need better measurements of cosmological distances to observationally test the increasing H0 tension of the Hubble constant measured from different tools5,6,7. Using spectroastrometry8, GRAVITY at The Very Large Telescope Interferometer successfully revealed the structure, kinematics and angular sizes of the broad-line region (BLR) of 3C 273 with an unprecedentedly high spatial resolution9. Fortunately, reverberation mapping (RM)10 of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) reliably provides linear sizes of their BLRs11. Here, we report a joint analysis of spectroastrometry and RM observations to measure AGN distances. We apply this analysis to 3C 273 observed by both GRAVITY9 and an RM campaign12, and find an angular distance of \(551.{5}_{-78.7}^{+97.3} \) Mpc and \({H}_{0}=71.{5}_{-10.6}^{+11.9}\ {\rm{km}}\ {{\rm{s}}}^{-1}\ {{\rm{Mpc}}}^{-1} \). The advantages of the analysis are its pure geometrical measurements and that it simultaneously yields the mass of the central black hole. Moreover, we can conveniently repeat measurements of selected AGNs to efficiently reduce the statistical and systematic errors. Future observations of a reasonably sized sample (~30 AGNs) will provide the distances of the AGNs and hence a new way of measuring H0 with a high precision (≲3%) to test the H0 tension.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support by National Key R&D Program of China through grant 2016YFA0400701, by NSFC through grants NSFC-11991050, -11873048, -11833008 and -11573026, and by grant no. QYZDJ-SSW-SLH007 from the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, CAS, by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences grant no. XDB23010400. E. Sturm is thanked for useful information of GRAVITY and the future GRAVITY\({}^{+} \) capabilities. J.-M.W. is grateful to M. Brotherton for careful reading the manuscript and useful discussions, to B.-W. Jiang, D.-W. Bao, W.-J. Guo and S.-S. Li who helped with the target selections.
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J.-M.W. conceived this project and wrote the paper. Y.-Y.S., Y.-R.L. and J.-M.W. made all calculations. Z.-X.Z. and P.D. made observations and performed the data reduction. J.-M.W., Z.-X.Z. and P.D. selected targets of the future SARM projects. All the authors discussed the contents of the paper.
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Wang, JM., Songsheng, YY., Li, YR. et al. A parallax distance to 3C 273 through spectroastrometry and reverberation mapping. Nat Astron 4, 517–525 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0979-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0979-5
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