37 research outputs found
Direct diagnostics of forming massive stars: stellar pulsation and periodic variability of maser sources
The 6.7 GHz methanol maser emission, a tracer of forming massive stars,
sometimes shows enigmatic periodic flux variations over several 10-100 days. In
this Letter, we propose that this periodic variations could be explained by the
pulsation of massive protostars growing under rapid mass accretion with rates
of Mdot > 10^-3 Msun/yr. Our stellar evolution calculations predict that the
massive protostars have very large radius exceeding 100 Rsun at maximum, and we
here study the pulsational stability of such the bloated protostars by way of
the linear stability analysis. We show that the protostar becomes pulsationally
unstable with various periods of several 10-100 days, depending on different
accretion rates. With the fact that the stellar luminosity when the star is
pulsationally unstable also depends on the accretion rate, we derive the
period-luminosity relation log (L/Lsun) = 4.62 + 0.98log(P/100 day), which is
testable with future observations. Our models further show that the radius and
mass of the pulsating massive protostar should also depend on the period. It
would be possible to infer such protostellar properties and the accretion rate
with the observed period. Measuring the maser periods enables a direct
diagnosis of the structure of accreting massive protostars, which are deeply
embedded in dense gas and inaccessible with other observations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in ApJ
Trigonometric distance and proper motions of H2O maser bowshocks in AFGL 5142
We present the results of multi-epoch VLBI observations of water masers in
the AGFL 5142 massive star forming region. We measure an annual parallax of
mas, corresponding to a source distance of
kpc. Proper motion and line of sight velocities
reveal the 3D kinematics of masers in this region, most of which associate with
millimeter sources from the literature. In particular we find remarkable
bipolar bowshocks expanding from the most massive member, AFGL 5142 MM1, which
are used to investigate the physical properties of its protostellar jet. We
attempt to link the known outflows in this region to possible progenitors by
considering a precessing jet scenario and we discuss the episodic nature of
ejections in AFGL 5142