Speaker
Description
We present an investigation of the L-band emission from known massive young stellar objects (MYSOs) in the SARAO MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey to search for non-thermal radio emitters from the sample. A total of 398 massive protostars, identified from the Red MSX Source (RMS) survey, are located within the survey region. Among these, 164 fields that host the protostars are isolated from nearby bright HII regions, allowing for the study of any ionized jets present in the fields. Seventy-four of these fields have jets with five-sigma detections or higher, corresponding to a detection rate of 45%. The MeerKAT fluxes of the detections, together with the upper limits of the non-detections and any other fluxes from previous observations, were used to estimate the spectral indices of the jets, to search for the presence of non-thermal radiation. In cases where a source manifests a single emission at a given observation but is resolved into multiple components in observations of higher resolutions, the
sum of the fluxes of the components was used in estimating the indices. Any effects from missing flux in higher resolution observations were incorporated into the uncertainties of the indices. The spectral indices of the sample show that at least 40% of the jets emit non-thermal radiation. Additionally, the spectral energy distribution (SED) of some of the sources, as well as their radio-luminosities exhibit evidence of non-thermal emission, especially in extended sources.
