The Structure of the Radio Recombination Line Maser Emission in the Envelope of MWC349A

Abstract

The Submillimeter Array (SMA) has been used to image the emission from radio recombination lines of hydrogen at subarcsecond angular resolution from the young high-mass star MWC349A in the H26$α$, H30$α$, and H31$α$ transitions at 353, 232, and 211 GHz, respectively. Emission was seen over a range of 80 kms-1 in velocity and 50~mas (corresponding to 60~AU for a distance of 1200 pc). The emission at each frequency has two distinct components, one from gas in a nearly edge-on annular disk structure in Keplerian motion, and another from gas lifted off the disk at distances of up to about 25~AU from the star. The slopes of the position-velocity (PV) curves for the disk emission show a monotonic progression of the emission radius with frequency with relative radii of $0.85\pm0.04$, 1, and $1.02\pm0.01$ for the H26$α$, H30$α$, and H31$α$ transitions, respectively. This trend is consistent with theoretical excitation models of maser emission from a region where the density decreases with radius and the lower transitions are preferentially excited at higher densities. The mass is difficult to estimate from the PV diagrams because the wind components dominate the emission at the disk edges. The mass estimate is constrained to be only in the range of 10--30 solar masses. The distribution of the wind emission among the transitions is surprisingly different, which reflects its sensitivity to excitation conditions. The wind probably extracts significant angular momentum from the system.