Landing page for project EH043

Hydroxyl (OH) Megamasers in (U)LIRG galaxies are known to trace circumnuclear regions within about 10 parsecs of central engines and have enabled to study nuclear regions of the galaxies such as obscuring tori, outflows, and nuclear star-bursts. OH Megamasers that amplify background radio continuum by foreground excited OH molecular gas can probe both high-brightness compact maser spots and diffuse extended components. NGC1068 is the nearby spiral galaxy hosting a type 2 Seyfert nucleus and a prototypical example of the AGN unified theory, in which an active nucleus is obscured by optically-thick dusty torus and molecular materials in line of sight. However, the complete picture of the nuclear region has been unclear because the distribution of dust and molecular gas over several pc to tens of pc scales has not been clarified sufficiently. In this program, we propose to map the distributions of OH maser spots with the EVN and MERLIN, which can reveal OH molecular gases surrounding a central engine at 0.5 pc to 10 pc scales to obtain a total picture of the nuclear region of the galaxy, based on various information accumulated from past observations.

This data is part of the archive of VLBI data maintained by JIVE on behalf of the EVN, a network of radio telescopes located primarily in Europe and Asia, with additional antennas in South Africa. The EVN archive itself has the DOI https://doi.org/10.17616/R3Z197