Protostellar Outflows at the EarliesT Stages (POETS) I. Radio thermal jets at high resolution nearby H2O maser sources

Abridged. Methods. We made use of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in the B configuration at K band, and in the A configuration at both Ku and C bands, in order to image the radio continuum emission towards 25 H$_2$O maser sites with an angular resolution and thermal rms of the order of $0.1''$ and 10 $\mu$Jy beam$^{-1}$, respectively. These targets add to our pilot study of 11 maser sites presented in Moscadelli et al. (2016). The sample of H$_2$O maser sites was selected among those regions having an accurate distance measurement, obtained through maser trigonometric parallaxes, and H$_2$O maser luminosities in excess of 10$^{-6}$ L$_{\odot}$. Results. We present high-resolution radio continuum images of 33 sources belonging to 25 star-forming regions. In each region, we detect radio continuum emission within a few 1000 au of the H$_2$O masers' position; 50% of the radio continuum sources are associated with bolometric luminosities exceeding 5 $\times$ 10$^{3}$ L$_{\odot}$, including W33A and G240.32$+$0.07. We provide a detailed spectral index analysis for each radio continuum source, based on the integrated fluxes at each frequency, and produce spectral index maps with the multi-frequency-synthesis deconvolution algorithm of CASA. The radio continuum emission traces thermal bremsstrahlung in (proto)stellar winds and jets, with flux densities at 22 GHz below 3 mJy, and spectral index values between $-0.1$ and 1.3. We prove a strong correlation ($r>$0.8) between the radio continuum luminosity (L$_{\rm rad}$) and the H$_2$O maser luminosity (L$_{\rm H_2O}$) of ($\rm L_{8GHz}/mJy\times kpc^2)=10^{3.8}\times(L_{H_2O}/L_{\odot})^{0.74}$. Since H$_2$O masers are excited through shocks driven by (proto)stellar winds and jets, these results provide support to the idea that the radio continuum emission around young stars is dominated by shock-ionization.