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E. Araya (New Mexico Tech), P. Hofner (NRAO & New Mexico Tech), S. Kurtz (Centro de Radioastronom\'{i}a y Astrof\'{i}sica, UNAM, Mexico), H. Linz (TLS Tautenburg & Max--Planck--Institut für Astronomie, Germany), L. Olmi (Istituto di Radioastronomia, Italy), M. Sewilo, C. Watson, E. Churchwell (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
A survey for H2CO 6cm emission toward young massive stellar objects was conducted using the 305m Arecibo Telescope. We detected emission toward IRAS18566+0408, only the fifth source in the Galaxy known to show H2CO 6cm emission. We report VLA observations toward this source intended to determine the nature of the emission line. Our observations show that the H2CO source is due to maser emission, making IRAS18566+0408 the fourth Galactic H2CO 6cm maser source. We also report detection of a weak 2cm continuum source that is coincident with the H2CO maser. Given the current observational constraints, the maser could be due to the radiative pumping mechanism proposed by Boland & de Jong (1981), however the coincidence of the new H2CO maser with 22GHz H2O masers suggests that shocked molecular gas could also play a role in its excitation.
P.H. acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-0098524 and the Research Corporation grant Nr. CC4996. H.~L. was supported by the German Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant Ste 605/17-2. EBC acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-0303689.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.