Abstract
Abstract It has been reported that the 22 GHz water maser in the star-forming region Orion-KL has started an outburst (Omodaka et al. 1998, IAU Circ. 6893). We measured the linear polarization of the maser after the burst, during a phase of rapid flux density decrease. We found that the total flux density of 2.4 × 106 Jy (1998 December) exhibits about 46% linear polarization. Over the next six months we found that the total intensity decrease by about two orders of magnitude, while the fractional linear polarization gradually fell to 30%. These results suggest that the present bursting phenomenon has an origin similar to the super-maser event starting in 1979, and that the phenomenon of the extremely bright masers in this region is geometric in nature and related to a strong magnetic field.
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