May 24th-26th, 2011. The second “BeSSeL Plan” workshop was hod in Bonn, Germany with attendance of nearly 20 astronomers from China, US, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Korea, Japan, and Thailand. As the Chinese members of the international project, Prof. Xingwu Zheng from Nanjing University, Prof. Bo Zhang from Shanghai Observatory, and Prof. Ye Xu from Purple Mountain Observatory participated in the workshop together with 3 other young Chinese scholars Yan Sun, Jingjing Li ,and Yuanwei Wu.
The participants demonstrated the latest results of the 2010-2011 observations of the proper motion and parallax of maser sources in massive star formation regions and discussed on the work plan for the coming years. The latest results show that the structure of the spiral arms of our Galaxy is far more complex than we have thought. For example, the results of the parallax observations have shown that the massive star formation region though to be in the Perseus arm is actually located in the local arm. This also shows that the parallax observation is currently the only reliable method in determining the spiral arm structure.
Participants from PMO showed the results of the testing observations obtained by the superconductive imaging spectrometer newly installed to the 13.7m millimeter-wave radio telescope of Qinhai station and introduced the coming Galactic plane survey project--Scroll of the Galaxy. Prof. Karl Menten, head of the Max-Planck institute for radioastronomy showed great enthusiasm for future cooperation and provided many constructive suggestions.
It was preliminarily determined that the next meeting will be hod in Nanjing, hosted by PMO. |
