Observational Studies of Masers in Star-forming Regions with KVN and KaVA

  • Published : 2014.10.13

Abstract

Methanol masers are divided into two classes, I and II. Class II methanol masers trace the disk-outflow systems of massive young stellar objects (YSOs), while class I methanol masers appear to trace the interaction regions of outflows with the ambient molecular gas. Class II masers have been extensively studied by single dishes, connected arrays, and VLBIs. Meanwhile, class I masers have been much less studied. They have not been detected by any VLBI facility. Thus they have been believed to have more extended structures than class II masers. We made fringe surveys of 44GHz class I methanol maser emission towards more than 150 massive YSOs with flux densities >10 Jy using the Korean VLBI Network (KVN), and detected fringes in ~10% of the sources. We performed follow-up imaging observations of the detected maser sources with KVN and KVN+VERA (KaVA). The observations aim to investigate the distribution and kinematics of 44GHz methanol maser features in each source at milli-arcsecond resolutions, and to understand what they trace. In this talk we will present the fringe survey and imaging results and our plans for further studies. Additionally, we will also introduce the preliminary results of single-dish polarization observations of water and class I methanol masers.

Keywords