Water at the earliest stages of star and planet formation

Abstract Water, an essential molecule for sustaining life on Earth, plays a crucial role in the physical and chemical processes governing the formation of stars and planets, serving as a primary coolant in the environments surrounding emerging stars. The journey of water from the earliest stages of star and planet formation to its eventual incorporation to exoplanetary atmospheres and its potential oceans is still a matter of debate. Very recent works using ALMA and JWST data reveals that water can be found in the inner astronomical units in protoplanetary disks, in the terrestrial planet-forming zone. Detecting water molecules from ground-based telescopes is challenging due to the water vapor content within Earth’s atmosphere, severely limiting atmospheric transmissivity. Nevertheless, water is one of the few compounds capable of generating bright maser emission within star-forming regions. Their exceptional brightness, narrow spectral profiles, and their origin in highly compact regions offer a unique set of characteristics that render them invaluable tools for investigating circumstellar structure and dynamics at sub-arcsecond spatial scales. In this work we present our efforts to search and characterize water maser emission at submillimeter frequencies in a sample of young stellar objects.