Abstract
The 25 years following the serendipitous discovery of megamasers have seen tremendous progress in the study of luminous extragalactic H2O emission. Single-dish monitoring and high-resolution interferometry have been used to identify sites of massive star formation, to study the interaction of nuclear jets with dense molecular gas and to investigate the circumnuclear environment of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Accretion disks with radii of 0.1 to 3 pc were mapped and masses of nuclear engines of order 10 exp 6 to 10 exp 8 solar masses were determined. So far, approximately 50 extragalactic H2O maser sources have been detected, but few have been studied in detail.