Megamaser be very different from those that produce galactic water masers. Observations of water megamasers have been used to make accurate measurements of distances to galaxies in order to provide constraints on the Hubble constant. The word maser derives from the acronym MASER, which stands for "Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". The maser is a predecessor to lasers, which operate at optical wavelengths, and is named by the replacement of "microwave" with "light". Given a system of atoms or molecules, each with different energy states, an atom or molecule may absorb a photon and move to a higher energy
Maser watts, and hence the total signal power received was only -169 decibels with respect to a milliwatt (dBm). Maser A maser (, an acronym for "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation") is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and H. J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Townes, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work leading to the maser. Masers are used as the timekeeping device in atomic clocks, and as extremely