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

Abstract

Abstract We report on long-term single-dish and VLBI monitoring for intermittent flare activities of a dominant blue-shifted H2O maser associated with a southern high mass young stellar object, G353.273+0.641. Bi-weekly single-dish monitoring using the Hokkaido University Tomakomai 11 m radio telescope has shown that a systematic acceleration continues over four years beyond the lifetime of individual maser features. This fact suggests that the H2O maser traces a region where molecular gas is steadily accelerated. There were five maser flares during the five years of monitoring, and maser distributions in four of them were densely monitored by 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 ∼ 8°–17° from the line of sight). Most maser features were recurrently excited within a region of 100×100 au2 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 a source distance of 1.70$^{+0.19}_{-0.16}$ kpc that is consistent with the commonly used photometric distance.