The intense line emission of OH masers is a perfect tracer of regions where new stars are born as well as of evolved stars, shedding large amounts of processed matter into the interstellar medium. From SKA deep surveys at 18 cm, where the maser lines from the ground-state of the OH molecule arise, we predict the discovery of more than 20000 sources of stellar and interstellar origin throughout the Galaxy. The study of this maser emission has many applications, including the determination of magnetic field strengths from polarisation measurements, studies of stellar kinematics using the precisely determined radial velocities, and distance determinations from VLBI astrometry. A new opportunity to study shocked gas in different galactic environments is expected to arise with the detection of lower luminosity masers. For the first time, larger numbers of OH masers will be detected in Local Group galaxies. New insights are expected in structure formation in galaxies by comparing maser populations in galaxies of different metallicity, as both their properties as well as their numbers depend on it. With the full capabilities of SKA, further maser transitions such as from excited OH and from methanol will be accessible, providing new tools to study the evolution of star-forming regions in particular.Advancing Astrophysics with the Square Kilometre Array

The RadioAstron space-VLBI mission has successfully detected extragalactic H2O MegaMaser emission regions at very long Earth to space baselines ranging between 1.4 and 26.7 Earth Diameters (ED). The preliminary results for two galaxies, NGC 3079 and NGC 4258, at baselines longer than one ED indicate masering environments and excitation conditions in these galaxies that are distinctly different. Further observations of NGC 4258 at longer baselines will reveal more of the physics of individual emission regions.

We report the detection with the ATCA of 6.7 GHz methanol emission towards OMC-1. The source has a size between 40 ′′ and 90 ′′ , is located to the south-east of Ori-KL and may coincide in position with the 25 GHz masers. The source may be an example of an interesting case recently predicted in theory where the transitions of traditionally different methanol maser classes show maser activity simultaneously. In addition, results of recent search for methanol masers from the 25 and 104.3 GHz transitions are reported.

The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) has been used to make the first full polarization observations of 6.7 GHz methanol masers. Linear polarization was detected towards all four sources observed, at levels between a few and 10%, while none of the sources show circular polarization stronger than approximately 1.5%. Linear polarization appears to be more common in the 6.7 GHz methanol maser transition than it is for the 12.2 GHz transition, consistent with the hypothesis that the 6.7 GHz masers are more saturated.

Since the discovery of the 12.2 and 6.7 GHz methanol maser lines, these masers have been studied in great detail. Even in the earliest studies, it appeared that in some fraction of the sources, the maser spots were arranged in lines. This contrasts with the well-studied OH and water masers, in which the masers tended to be clustered almost randomly around a compact H ɪɪ region. Here I describe recent work to investigate the hypothesis that these lines represent edge-on circumstellar disks.