The Circumstellar Environment around the Embedded Protostar EC 53

Abstract

EC 53 is an embedded protostar with quasi-periodic emission in the near-IR and submillimeter. We use Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) high-resolution observations of continuum and molecular line emission to describe the circumstellar environment of EC 53. The continuum image reveals a disk with a flux that suggests a mass of 0.075  M ⊙ , much less than the estimated mass in the envelope, and an in-band spectral index that indicates grain growth to centimeter sizes. Molecular lines trace the outflow cavity walls, infalling and rotating envelope, and/or the Keplerian disk. The rotation profile of the C 17 O 3–2 line emission cannot isolate the Keplerian motion clearly, although the lower limit of the protostellar mass can be calculated as 0.3 ± 0.1  M ⊙ if the Keplerian motion is adopted. The weak CH 3 OH emission, which is anticorrelated with the H 13 CO +  4–3 line emission, indicates that the water snow line is more extended than what expected from the current luminosity, attesting to bygone outburst events. The extended snow line may persist for longer at the disk surface because the lower density increases the freeze-out timescale of methanol and water.