The nature of the nuclear h2o masers of ngc 1068: reverberation and evidence for a rotating disk geometry

Apr, 2001
62 pages
Published in:
  • Astrophys.J. 556 (2001) 694
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Abstract: (arXiv)
We report new (1995) Very Large Array observations and (1984 - 1999) Effelsberg 100m monitoring observations of the 22 GHz H2O maser spectrum of the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 1068. The sensitive VLA observations provide a registration of the 22 GHz continuum emission and the location of the maser spots with an accuracy of ~ 5 mas. Within the monitoring data, we find evidence that the nuclear masers vary coherently on time-scales of months to years, much more rapidly than the dynamical time-scale. We argue that the nuclear masers are responding in reverberation to a central power source, presumably the central engine. Between October and November 1997, we detected a simultaneous flare of the blue-shifted and red-shifted satellite maser lines. Reverberation in a rotating disk naturally explains the simultaneous flaring. There is also evidence that near-infrared emission from dust grains associated with the maser disk also responds to the central engine. We present a model in which an X-ray flare results in both the loss of maser signal in 1990 and the peak of the near-infrared light curve in 1994. In support of a rotating disk geometry for the nuclear masers, we find no evidence for centripetal accelerations of the redshifted nuclear masers: the limits are +/- 0.006 km/s/year, implying that the masers are located within 2 degrees of the kinematic line-of-nodes. We also searched for high velocity maser emission like that observed in NGC 4258. In both VLA and Effelsberg spectra, we detect no high velocity lines between +/- 350 km/s to +/- 850 km/s relative to systemic, arguing that masers only lie outside a radius of ~ 0.6 pc (1.9 light years) from the central engine (assuming a distance of 14.4 Mpc).