Accelerating a water maser face-on jet from a high mass young stellar object

TL;DR

This study monitors water maser flares in a high-mass young stellar object, revealing a steadily accelerating bipolar jet almost face-on, with episodic shocks causing intermittent flares and a measured distance of 1.70 kpc.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed long-term VLBI and single-dish observations of maser flare activities and jet kinematics in a high-mass YSO, confirming episodic shock propagation and steady acceleration.

Findings

Maser features show systematic acceleration over four years.

The jet is nearly face-on with an inclination of 8-17 degrees.

Distance to the source is measured as 1.70 kpc.

Abstract

We report on a long-term single-dish and VLBI monitoring for intermittent flare activities of a Dominant Blue-Shifted H$_{2}$O Maser (DBSM) associated with a southern high mass young stellar object, G353.273+0.641. Bi-weekly single-dish monitoring using Hokkaido University Tomakomai 11-m radio telescope has shown that a systematic acceleration continues over four years beyond a lifetime of individual maser features. This fact suggests that the H$_{2}$O maser traces a region where molecular gas is steadily accelerated. There were five maser flares during five-years monitoring, and maser distributions in four of them were densely monitored by the VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry (VERA). The overall distribution of the maser features suggests the presence of a bipolar jet, with the 3D kinematics indicating that it is almost face-on (inclination angle of $\sim$ 8$^{\fdg}$--17$^{\fdg}$ from the line-of-sight). Most of maser features were recurrently excited within a region of 100$\times$100 AU$^{2}$ around the radio continuum peak, while their spatial distributions significantly varied between each flare. This confirms that episodic propagations of outflow shocks recurrently invoke intermittent flare activities. We also measured annual parallax, deriving the source distance of 1.70 $^{+0.19}_{-0.16}$ kpc that is consistent with the commonly-used photometric distance.