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Radial Velocity Structure in OH and H2O Masers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2016

S. H. Knowles
S. H. Knowles*
Affiliation:
Division of Radiophysics, CSIRO, Sydney
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Extract

Since the discovery of highly masering OH emission, and later of H2O masers, there has been little progress made in understanding their geometry and structure. Although both OH and H2O spectra are highly complex, no one has been able to ‘decode’ the information from the many individual features. Knowles and Batchelor (1976) have recently suggested that many water vapour spectra have a symmetrical character, with one or more pairs of features equally spaced in radial velocity about a central axis. It is here proposed that a similar symmetry exists in HH-region OH masers as well as main-line OH stars such as VY CMa. We also demonstrate that features at close to the same radial velocity are often present in several different OH and H2O transitions and probably come from the same masering cloud. From this widely applicable empirical observational model we then make a few simple deductions about the possible geometry of such masering regions.

Type
Contributions
Information
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , September 1976 , pp. 55 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of Australia 1976

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References

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