High sensitivity and angular resolution observations of the radio continuum toward W3 IRS 5, along with observations of strong water masers, have been made with the Very Large Array (VLA). At least seven distinct radio continuum sources have been discovered, which are most likely a cluster of B0.5-B0 stars with ionized stellar winds. This is in contrast to previous interpretations of observational data, which suggested that IRS 5 is a single massive protostar with bolometric luminosity of 2 x 105 solar luminosity. The spatial distribution of the water masers roughly follows that of the radio sources; and these masers show a gradient in radial velocity similar to that found in a larger scale molecular outflow. We suggest that previously observed, multicomponent absorption in CO infrared transitions traces outflows from the several stellar wind sources, rather than episodic outbursts from a single source.
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Claussen et al. (1994) studied this question.