Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21341319p&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #413.19; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.223
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We present spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of a flux limited sample of 6.7 GHz methanol masers. Methanol masers at 6.7 GHz are thought to trace early phases of massive star formation though their turn-on and turn-off points are not known. To obtain constraints on the age of the massive young stellar objects associated with the masers, we obtained 3.6 cm, 1.3 cm and 7 mm continuum data with the VLA at comparable angular resolution towards a sample of 20 methanol masers selected from the Arecibo Methanol Maser Galactic Plane Survey. The emission at these wavelengths is dominated by thermal bremmsstrahlung, whose turn-over frequency is correlated to the age of the young stellar object. More than half of the methanol masers in our sample have no emission at 3.6 cm and 1.3 cm, while the spectral index of the majority of the remaining sources is consistent
with optically thick free-free emission. This clearly shows that methanol masers are mostly associated with very early phases of massive star formation in which the HII region is pinched off, or with hypercompact HII regions.
Goldsmith Paul F.
Menten Karl. M.
Momjian Emmanuel
Pandian Jagadheep D.
Xu Yadong
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