Astronomers Track the Motions of Masers, Find That They Move at 45,000 MPH

New Measurements Track the Motions of Masers Over a Ten Year Period

The young star AFGL 2591 star is expelling gas and dust as seen in the infrared. Amidst the nebulosity and rings of activity are clumps emitting as water vapor masers. New measurements have tracked the motions of these masers over a ten-year period, and find them moving at velocities of about 45,000 mph (72,400 kph). Credit: C. Aspin et al., NIRI, Gemini Obs., NSF

Using a coordinated set of widely separated radio telescopes, astronomers tracked the motions of masers over a ten-year period, finding that they moved at velocities of about twenty kilometers per second (forty-five thousand mph).

A maser, like a laser, is a source of bright electromagnetic radiation, with the difference being that maser radiation is not optical light but rather longer wavelength, microwave radiation. Small, dense molecular clouds in interstellar space sometimes produce natural masers; water vapor in clouds undergoing active star formation generates some of the most spectacular such masers. In the most dramatic cases, a water vapor maser can radiate more energy at a single wavelength than does the Sun over its entire visible spectrum.

Masers are interesting in their own right, but also because their bright emission provides a powerful diagnostic probe of regions where massive star formation is still underway. CfA astronomer Nimesh Patel and his colleagues have used a coordinated set of widely separated radio telescopes (an interferometer) to study a dramatic region of star formation about ten thousand light-years away, achieving a spatial resolution of only a few hundred astronomical units (one AU is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun). This spectacular precision is possible because the masers are so bright.

The star formation region was known to have several clumps of young, high-mass stars accompanied by phenomena typically associated with such star birth like powerful outflows and shocks. The astronomers combined relatively recent and archival observations of masers in the region spanning a period of about ten years, starting in 1999; the precision of the data enabled them to detect the masers motion over this period. The maser clusters, which are distributed over about a thousand AU, had some clumps seen to move as much as fifty AU, corresponding to velocities of about twenty kilometers per second (forty-five thousand mph).

In the case of one bright region, the measurements over ten years found that the material is tracing the shell of an outward-moving shock, presumably propelled by radiation from the young star forming at the center. The results confirm and extend detailed models of how newly born massive stars affect their environment.

Reference: “Multi-epoch VLBA H2O maser observations towards the massive YSOs AFGL 2591 VLA 2 and VLA 3” by J. M. Torrelles, M. A. Trinidad, S. Curiel, R. Estalella, N. A. Patel, J. F. Gómez, G. Anglada, C. Carrasco-González, J. Cantó, A. Raga and L. F. Rodríguez, 6 December 2013, MNRAS.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stt2177
arXiv:1311.1901

 

 

Be the first to comment on "Astronomers Track the Motions of Masers, Find That They Move at 45,000 MPH"

Leave a comment

Email address is optional. If provided, your email will not be published or shared.