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SWAG Water Masers in the Galactic Center

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 نشر من قبل Juergen Ott
 تاريخ النشر 2017
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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The Galactic Center contains large amounts of molecular and ionized gas as well as a plethora of energetic objects. Water masers are an extinction-insensitive probe for star formation and thus ideal for studies of star formation stages in this highly obscured region. With the Australia Telescope Compact Array, we observed 22 GHz water masers in the entire Central Molecular Zone with sub-parsec resolution as part of the large SWAG survey: ``Survey of Water and Ammonia in the Galactic Center. We detect of order 600 22 GHz masers with isotropic luminosities down to ~10^-7 Lo. Masers with luminosities of >~10^-6 Lo are likely associated with young stellar objects. They appear to be close to molecular gas streamers and may be due to star formation events that are triggered at pericenter passages near Sgr A*. Weaker masers are more widely distributed and frequently show double line features, a tell-tale sign for an origin in evolved star envelopes.

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SWAG (Survey of Water and Ammonia in the Galactic Center) is a multi-line interferometric survey toward the Center of the Milky Way conducted with the Australia Telescope Compact Array. The survey region spans the entire ~400pc Central Molecular Zone and comprises ~42 spectral lines at pc spatial and sub-km/s spectral resolution. In addition, we deeply map continuum intensity, spectral index, and polarization at the frequencies where synchrotron, free-free, and thermal dust sources emit. The observed spectral lines include many transitions of ammonia, which we use to construct maps of molecular gas temperature, opacity and gas formation temperature (see poster by Nico Krieger et al., this volume). Water masers pinpoint the sites of active star formation and other lines are good tracers for density, radiation field, shocks, and ionization. This extremely rich survey forms a perfect basis to construct maps of the physical parameters of the gas in this extreme environment.
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