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Intrinsic Sizes of the W3 (OH) Masers via Short Time Scale Variability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Tanmoy Laskar
Affiliation:
Harvard University, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA - 02138, USA email: tlaskar@cfa.harvard.edu
W. M. Goss
Affiliation:
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, PO Box 0, Socorro, NM - 87801, USA textitail: mgoss@aoc.nrao.edu
B. Ashley Zauderer
Affiliation:
Harvard University, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA - 02138, USA email: tlaskar@cfa.harvard.edu
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Abstract

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We present a study of short time-scale variability of OH masers within a contiguous 15-hour Very Long Baseline Array observation of the high-mass star-forming region, W3 (OH). With an angular resolution of ~7 mas and a velocity resolution of 53 m s−1, we isolate emission from masers in the field into individual Gaussian-shaped components, each a few milliarcseconds in size. We compute dynamic spectra for individual maser features with a time resolution of 1 minute by fitting for the flux density of all sources in the field simultaneously in the uv-domain. We isolate intrinsic maser variability from interstellar scintillation and instrumental effects. We find fluctuations in the maser line shape on time scales of 5 to 20 minutes, corresponding to maser column lengths of 0.5 to 2.0 Astronomical Units.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2012

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