Derek Felli

We looked into OH-MASER transitions considered rare in star forming regions. A MASER (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) is emission from compact clouds of molecular gas. MASERs may consist of OH, H2O, SiO and CH3OH molecules to name some of the most common and intense. This study is helping to provide further evidence that specific OH-MASER transitions might only occur in high mass star forming regions and not low mass star forming region. If proven correct this information will be valuable in the understanding of the high and low mass star formation processes. This is helpful in describe unknown star forming regions.

I learned a great deal about MASERs over the course of this project. I even had a great deal of expertise on the subject in my classes and could fill in information when the subject of radio astronomy came up. I presented my research in Denver Colorado at the Four Corners meeting, at BYU Spring research conference, and The American Astronomical Society meeting in Miami Florida. I am also using the topic to write my senior thesis which is nearly complete.

Over the summer I went to an internship in Puerto Rico to work on similar research. My project was a great preparation for that. The project involved a survey of most of the star forming regions within the galaxy. Forty four of these sources have been observed already (about 1/3 of the strong known MASERs in the galaxy). These MASER sources were observed with the VLBA. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory VLBA consists of ten large radio antennas placed across the U.S. The largest base line is 8600 km, which is useful for the Interferometry part of our experiment.

I used the program AIPS (Astronomical Image Processing System) for the last year to calibrate this Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) data and to obtain preliminary results. This has brought evidence thus so far to support that OH-MASERs have specific transitions in high mass star forming regions. AIPS has power tools to organize the radio data and allows for such tasks to be performed such as amplitude and phase calibration, delay, velocity and elevation correction and fringe fitting. AIPS also generates plots and images to analyze the data.

Many times I needed to redo calibrations that took a lot of time, but that was part of the learning experience to learn about MASERs, radio data, and running computer code.