Velocity and distance of methanol maser sources

On the color-color diagram, more than 70% of the objects fall within a very small region (0.57<=[25-12]<=1.30 and 1.30<=[60-12]<=2.50). This suggests that 6.7GHz methanol maser emission occurs only within a very short evolutionary phase during the earliest stage of star formation.

The velocity ranges of the masers belong to two main groups: one from 1 to 10km/s, and one from about 11 to 20km/s. These velocity ranges indicate that the masers are probably associated with both disks and outflows. The correlations between the maser and infrared flux densities, and between the maser and infrared luminosities, suggest that far-infrared radiation is a possible pumping mechanism for the masers which most probably originate from some outer molecular envelopes or disks.