A gravitationally lensed water maser in the early Universe

Abstract

Water masers are found in dense molecular clouds closely associated with supermassive black holes in the centres of active galaxies. Based upon the understanding of the local water maser luminosity function, it was expected that masers at intermediate and high redshifts would be extremely rare, but galaxies at redshifts z > 2 might be quite different from those found locally, not least because of more frequent mergers and interaction events. Using gravitational lensing as a tool to enable us to search higher redshifts than would otherwise be possible, we have embarked on a survey of lensed galaxies, looking for masers. Here we report the discovery of a water maser at redshift 2.64 in the dust- and gas-rich gravitationally lensed type 1 quasar MG J0414+0534, which, with an isotropic luminosity of 10,000 L_solar, is twice as luminous as the most powerful local water maser, and half that of the most distant maser previously known. Using the locally-determined luminosity function, the probability of finding a maser this luminous associated with any single active galaxy is 10^{-6}. The fact that we saw such a maser in the first galaxy we observed must mean that the volume densities and luminosities of masers are higher at redshift 2.64.

9 pages, 2 figues, accepted for publication in Nature (18 December 2008)

References in corpus (3)

• Extinction Curves of Lensing Galaxies out to z=1
• The Parsec-scale Accretion Disk in NGC 3393
• HI and OH absorption in the lensing galaxy of MG J0414+0534

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• Illuminating the past 8 billion years of cold gas towards two gravitationally lensed quasars
• Evidence of a pure starburst nature of the nuclear region of NGC 253
• Inflowing gas onto a compact obscured nucleus in Arp 299A: Herschel spectroscopic studies of H2O and OH
• SUNRISE: The rich molecular inventory of high-redshift dusty galaxies revealed by broadband spectral line surveys
• Smoke on the water: CO and H2O in a circumnuclear disc around a quasar at redshift 2.64
• Euclid Preparation XXXIII. Characterization of convolutional neural networks for the identification of galaxy-galaxy strong lensing events
• Astrophysical constraints on the proton-to-electron mass ratio with FAST
• ALMA detection of millimetre 183 GHz H2O maser emission in the Superantennae galaxy at z ~ 0.06
• Radio continuum of galaxies with H${}_2$O megamaser disks: 33 GHz VLA data
• High-velocity-resolution observations of OH main line lasers in the M82 starburst
• Searching For the 380 GHz H2O emission from the High-z lensed QSO MG J0414+0534
• Tracing the merger rate of the Universe with APERTIF and ASKAP
• Quantum state of fields in $SU(\infty )$ Quantum Gravity ($SU(\infty )$-QGR)