Accretion disks around class 0 protostars: The case of VLA 1623

Continuum emission at 220 and 355 GHz from the prototype class 0 source VLA 1623 has been detected using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope-Caltech Submillimeter Observatory interferometer. Gaussian fits to the data place an upper limit of 70 AU on the half-width at half-maximum radius of the emission, which implies an upper limit of ∼ 175 AU for the cutoff radius of the circumstellar disk in the system. In the context of existing collapse …