The Sun's Displacement from the Galactic Plane from Spectroscopic Parallaxes of 2500 OB Stars

The Sun's vertical displacement from the galactic plane, Z_⊙, is determined model-independently from 3526 spectroscopic parallax distance estimates for 2488 OB stars within 1200 pc of the Sun. The result, 19.6+/-2.1 pc, agrees well with various other recent determinations. The distribution of stellar z-values as a function of galactic longitude shows a very scattered sinusoidal dependence with an amplitude of about 27 pc.