Journal
NATURE
Volume 456, Issue 7224, Pages 927-929Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature07544
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- European Community's Sixth Framework Marie Curie Research Training Network 'ANGLES'
- Priority and Emmy-Noether- Programmes of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Water masers(1-4) are found in dense molecular clouds closely associated with supermassive black holes at the centres of active galaxies. On the basis of the understanding of the local water- maser luminosity function(5), it was expected that masers at intermediate and high redshifts would be extremely rare. However, galaxies at redshifts z > 2 might be quite different from those found locally, not least because of more frequent mergers and interaction events. Here we use gravitational lensing to search for masers at higher redshifts than would otherwise be possible, and find a water maser at redshift 2.64 in the dust- and gas- rich, gravitationally lensed type- 1 quasar MGJ0414+0534 ( refs 6 - 13). The isotropic luminosity is 10,000L.(L., solar luminosity), which is twice that of the most powerful local water maser(14) and half that of the most distant maser previously known(15). Using the locally determined luminosity function5, the probability of finding a maser this luminous associated with any single active galaxy is 10(-6). The fact that we see such a maser in the first galaxy we observe must mean that the volume densities and luminosities of masers are higher at redshift 2.64.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available