The First Water Fountain in a Planetary Nebula with Synchrotron Emission

Planetary nebulae (PNe) show a great variety of morphologies at optical wavelengths that might be due to the effects of jets (Sahai & Trauger [8]) and where magnetic fields might also play an important role. The special class of “water fountain” stars, showing high-velocity, collimated jets traced by water maser emission are key objects to understand the transition to the PN phase and the effect of the jets. IRAS 15103–5754 has been revealed as the youngest PN known, caught just at its birth. It is the first PN that shows water fountain characteristics (Gómez et al. [5]), and it shows, for the first time, direct evidence of the presence of synchrotron emission in a PN, tracing energetic, magnetized shocks (Suárez et al. [9]). Moreover, we observed a sudden change in the spectral distribution of its radio continuum emission, which marks the fast, recent passage of the ionization front over the radio-emitting region (Suárez et al. [9])