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This study presents a general outline of the Qitai radio telescope (QTT) project. Qitai, the site of the telescope, is a county of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, located in the east Tianshan Mountains at an elevation of about 1800 m. The QTT is a fully steerable, Gregorian type telescope with a standard parabolic main reflector of 110 m diameter. The QTT has adopted an um-brella support, homology-symmetric lightweight design. The main reflector is active so that the deformation caused by gravity can be corrected. The structural design aims to ultimately allow high-sensitivity observations from 150 MHz up to 115 GHz. To satisfy the requirements for early scientific goals, the QTT will be equipped with ultra-wideband receivers and large field-of-view mul-ti-beam receivers. A multi-function signal-processing system based on RFSoC and GPU processor chips will be developed. These will enable the QTT to operate in pulsar, spectral line, continuum and Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) observing modes. Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and radio frequency interference (RFI) control techniques are adopted throughout the system design. The QTT will form a world-class observational platform for the detection of low-frequency (nanoHertz) gravitational waves through pulsar timing array (PTA) techniques, pulsar surveys, the discovery of binary black-hole systems, and exploring dark matter and the origin of life in the universe., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy

The absolute position of Sgr A*, the compact radio source at the center of the Milky Way, had been uncertain by several tens of milliarcseconds. Here we report improved astrometric measurements of the absolute position and proper motion of Sgr A*. Three epochs of phase-referencing observations were conducted with the Very Long Baseline Array for Sgr A* at 22 and 43 GHz in 2019 and 2020. Using extragalactic radio sources with submilliarcsecond-accurate positions as reference, we determined the absolute position of Sgr A* at a reference epoch 2020.0 to be at $\alpha$(J2000) = $17^{\rm h} 45^{\rm m}40.^{\rm s}032863~\pm~0.^{\rm s}000016$ and $\delta$(J2000) = $-29^{\circ} 00^{\prime} 28.^{''}24260~\pm~0.^{''}00047$, with an updated proper motion $-3.152~\pm~0.011$ and $-5.586~\pm~0.006$ mas yr$^{-1}$ in the easterly and northerly directions, respectively., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, accepted by ApJ

We compare the parallaxes of stars from VLBI astrometry in the literature to those in the Gaia DR2 catalog. Our full sample contains young stellar objects, evolved AGB stars, pulsars and other radio stars. Excluding AGB stars, which show significant discrepancies between Gaia and VLBI parallaxes, and stars in binary systems, we obtain an average, systematic, parallax offset of $-75 \pm 29~\mu$as for Gaia DR2, consistent with their estimate of a parallax zero-point between $-100$ and 0 $\mu$as., Comment: Accepted by ApJ

We report astrometric results of VLBI phase-referencing observations of 22 GHz \hho\ masers emission toward the red hypergiant \vxsgr, one of most massive and luminous red hypergiant stars in our Galaxy, using the Very Long Baseline Array. A background source, \Jtwoze, projected 4\d4 from the target \vxsgr, was used as the phase reference. For the low declinations of these sources, such a large separation normally would seriously degrade the relative astrometry. We use a two-step method of tropospheric delay calibration, which combines the VLBI geodetic-block (or GPS) calibration with an image-optimization calibration, to obtain a trigonometric parallax of $0.64\pm0.04$ mas, corresponding to a distance of 1.56$^{+0.11}_{-0.10}$ kpc. The measured proper motion of \vxsgr\ is $0.36\pm0.76$ and $-2.92\pm0.78$ \masy\ in the eastward and northward directions. The parallax and proper motion confirms that \vxsgr\ belong to the Sgr OB1 association. Rescaling bolometric luminosities in the literature to our parallax distance, we find the luminosity of \vxsgr~is $(1.95 \pm 0.62) \times 10^5$ \Lsun, where the uncertainty is dominated by differing photometry measurements., Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, accepted by ApJ