H2O megamasers: Accretion disks, jet interaction, outflows or massive star formation?
Abstract
The 25 years following the serendipitous discovery of megamasers have seen tremendous progress in the study of luminous extragalactic HO emission. Single-dish monitoring and high resolution interferometry have been used to identify sites of massive star formation, to study the interaction of nuclear jets with dense molecular gas and to investigate the circumnuclear environment of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Accretion disks with radii of 0.1--3 pc were mapped and masses of nuclear engines of order 10--10 M were determined. So far, 50 extragalactic HO maser sources have been detected, but few have been studied in detail.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0407161,
title = {H2O megamasers: Accretion disks, jet interaction, outflows or massive star formation?},
author = {C. Henkel and J. A. Braatz and A. Tarchi and A. B. Peck and N. M. Nagar and L. J. Greenhill and M. Wang and Y. Hagiwara},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0407161},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
12 pages, 4 figures, review accepted for publication in ApSS, Contribution to "Dense Molecular Gas around Protostars and in Galactic Nuclei", a European Workshop 2004 on Astronomical Molecules, held 17-20 Feb., Zwolle, the Netherlands, eds. Y. Hagiwara, W.A. Baan & H.J. van Langevelde