The Search for High Velocity Water Masers in High-Mass Star-Forming Regions

Water masers can be found in high-mass star-forming regions, where molecular, atomic, and ionized gas is present. In the ionized medium, free electrons interact with ions and emit photons that are then detected by radio telescopes such as the Very Large Array (VLA). For this project involving the search of these water masers, data from this telescope were accessed through an NSF ACCESS Jetstream2 virtual machine; the data were analyzed using a Jupyter Notebook and CASA (Common Astronomy SoNware ApplicaOons). IniOally, the project was to see if this method of searching for masers was funcOonal and accurate. Once this was proven successful, the aim of the project advanced to conduct a detailed search of water masers through various sources. The results of each of these searches are then compared with results from other papers that have been published to see if these results have been aRained before. While water masers were found, none of which were high-velocity, most of the results haven’t been present befor in published literature.