Discovery of widespread non-metastable ammonia masers in the Milky Way

Abstract

We present the results of a search for ammonia maser emission in 119 Galactic high-mass star-forming regions (HMSFRs) known to host 22 GHz H${}_2$O maser emission. Our survey has led to the discovery of non-metastable NH${}_3$ inversion line masers toward 14 of these sources. This doubles the number of known non-metastable ammonia masers in our Galaxy, including nine new very high excitation ($J,K$)~=~(9,6) maser sources. These maser lines, including NH${}_3$ (5,4), (6,4), (6,5), (7,6), (8,6), (9,6), (9,8), (10,8), and (11,9), arise from energy levels of 342 K, 513 K, 465 K, 606 K, 834 K, 1090 K, 942 K, 1226 K, and 1449 K above the ground state. Additionally, we tentatively report a new metastable NH${}_3$ (3,3) maser in G048.49 and an NH${}_3$ (7,7) maser in G029.95. Our observations reveal that all of the newly detected NH${}_3$ maser lines exhibit either blueshifted or redshifted velocities with respect to the source systemic velocities. Among the non-metastable ammonia maser lines, larger velocity distributions, offset from the source systemic velocities, are found in the ortho-NH${}_3$ ($K=3n$) than in the para-NH${}_3$ ($K\ne 3n$) transitions.

14 pages, 4 tables, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in A&A

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Ammonia in the hot core W51-IRS2: Maser line profiles, variability, and saturation