Determining the period of the long-period activity of the water-vapor maser in W75N

Abstract

We present the results of our study of the H2O maser emission from the source W75N, which is associated with a star-forming region, between November 1994 and March 1999. The observations were carried out with the RT-22 radio telescope of the Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory (Lebedev Physical Institute). The maser emission in 1994–1999 can be represented as a superposition of flares of separate components with a duration from two to six months, which occurred mainly in the radial-velocity range 8–17.5 km s−1. We detected a regular drift of the velocity centroid from 13 to 9 km s−1 and an abrupt change in its velocity from 9 to 5 km s−1, which took place at the initial stage of maser activity. Based on the variability of the total H2O flux in all years of our observations of W75N (from December 1979 through March 1999), we conclude that the long-period variability of the water-vapor maser emission has a period of ∼11.5 years. We give arguments that this variability is mainly associated with the most compact group of maser spots, whose positions coincide with the position of the continuum source VLA 2.