High Velocity Precessing Jets from the Water Fountain IRAS 18286–0959 Revealed by Very Long Baseline Array Observations

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal 2011-11, Vol.741 (2), p.94-jQuery1323901819364='48'
• Main Authors: Yung, Bosco H. K, Nakashima, Jun-ichi, Imai, Hiroshi, Deguchi, Shuji, Diamond, Philip J, Kwok, Sun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/741/2/94

We report the results of multi-epoch Very Long Baseline Array observations of the 22.2 GHz H2O maser emission associated with the 'water fountain' IRAS 18286--0959. We suggest that this object is the second example of a highly collimated bipolar precessing outflow traced by H2O maser emission, the other is W 43A. The detected H2O emission peaks are distributed over a velocity range from --50 km s--1 to 150 km s--1. The spatial distribution of over 70% of the identified maser features is found to be highly collimated along a spiral jet (jet 1) extended southeast to northwest; the remaining features appear to trace another spiral jet (jet 2) with a different orientation. The two jets form a 'double-helix' pattern which lies across ~200 mas. The maser distribution is reasonably fit by a model consisting of two bipolar precessing jets. The three-dimensional velocities of jet 1 and jet 2 are derived to be 138 km s--1 and 99 km s--1, respectively. The precession period of jet 1 is about 56 years. For jet 2, three possible models are tested and they give different values for the kinematic parameters. We propose that the appearance of two jets is the result of a single driving source with significant proper motion.