Artisanal poster of unique masers and observations at the IAUS 380

© This is my poster hand drawn by me, so feel free to use it. Results are in prep for publication.

Roughly every five years, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) hosts a symposium dedicated to astropysical masers, naturally occurring sources of stimulated spectral line emission, typically in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. There have been six maser IAU symposia so far, with the latest organized on March 20-24, 2023 in Kagoshima, Japan (https://iaus-maser2023.jp). These meetings provide the only major opportunity for maser researchers to gather together in person, out of which around 170 participated in Kagoshima from 28 countries. Kagoshima is also an important place, as it has a strong maser-focused department at Kagoshima University and it hosts one of the radio telescopes of the Japanese VERA, a very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) array purpose-built for maser observations.

As masers are interesting by themselves and also as tracers of their host environments (which there are many from stellar birthsites and deathbeds, all the way to power hungry active galactic nuclei in galaxies far far away), the IAU maser conferences cover a wide range of topics. They are also diverse in technical approaches, having theoreticians and modelers, single-dish, interferometric and VLBI observers, to even some who cross over into other wavelengths.

For my contribution in Kagoshima, I presented research of unique VLBI observations of unique maser lines towards the unique high-mass protostar G358.93-0.03-MM1. Since clearly everything was so "unique", the presentation needed to be unique as well. :-) Therefore, I went with and old school artisanal approach shown in the picture. The poster highlights the discovery of a maser burst of the common 6.7 GHz methanol line, the follow-up interferometric observations of never-before-seen 7.6 and 7.8 GHz methanol masers, and how they were mapped with an ad-hoc VLBI array, including telescopes from Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan.