Imaging the Jet of MWC 349A with Resolved Radio Recombination Line Emission from ALMA

Abstract

Jets and disk winds arise from materials with excess angular momentum ejected from the accretion disks in forming stars. How these structures are launched and how they impact the gas within the innermost regions of these objects remains poorly understood. MWC349A is a massive star that has a circumstellar disk that rotates in accord with Kepler’s Law, with an ionized wind and a high-velocity jet launched from the disk surface. The strongly maser-amplified emission of hydrogen radio recombination lines (RRLs) observed toward this system provides a comprehensive picture of its ionized environment with exquisite detail. In this Letter, we present Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations of the H26 α RRL and continuum emission obtained with the highest angular resolution ever used toward this source (beam of ∼0.″02). The maser RRL emission is resolved for the first time and clearly delineates the ionized disk, wind, and jet. We analyzed the RRL data cubes with the 3D non-LTE radiative transfer model MORELI, confirming that the jet is poorly collimated. We found that the jet orientation is closer to the rotation axis of the system than derived from spatially unresolved data. This study confirms that hydrogen RRL masers are powerful probes of the physical structure and kinematics of the innermost ionized material around massive stars.

Keywords

• Massive stars
• Circumstellar masers
• H II regions
• Stellar winds
• Stellar jets
• Stellar accretion disks