  In this paper we are mainly concerned with nontrivial positive solutions to
the Dirichlet problem for the degenerate elliptic equation
  \begin{gather}
  -\frac{\partial^2 u}{\partial x^2} -\left|x\right|^{2k}\frac{\partial^2
u}{\partial y^2}=|x|^{2k}u^p+f(x,y,u) \quad\text{ in }\Omega, \ u=0 \quad\text{
on }\partial\Omega,\label{equ0}
  \end{gather} where $\Omega$ is a bounded domain with smooth boundary in
$\mathbb{R}^2, \Omega \cap \{x=0\}\ne \emptyset,$ $k\in\mathbb N,$
$f(x,y,0)=0,$ and $p=(4+5k)/k$ is the critical exponent. Recently, the equation
(1) was investigated in [12] for the subcritical case based on a new result
obtained in [17] on embedding theorem of weighted Sobolev spaces. In the
critical case considered in this paper we will essentially use the optimal
functions and constants found in [17]
