NEAR-INFRARED IMAGING OF THE BECKLIN-NEUGEBAUER-IRC2 REGION IN ORION WITH SUBARCSECOND RESOLUTION

The Becklin-Neugebauer source has been partially resolved by speckle imagery at 3.6 mum with an angular resolution of 0.2''. The images, fluxes, and additional constraints are consistent with a spherical dust shell of inner diameter 0.1'', surrounding a hot star. The surrounding region, including the vicinity of IRc2, has been imaged with short-exposure/deconvolution methods at several wavelengths, at a resolution of 0.5''. IRc2 is resolved into four components, and the fluxes of the detected sources were determined at 2.8 and 4 mum. Accurate astronomy of the infrared sources with respect to the SiO maser emission has been obtained. The centroid of the SiO maser is definitely not located at the center of symmetry between lobes A and B, but may correspond to IRc2 component A. Component B may arise in scattering from one lobe of a bipolar flow from source A, but other explanations are still possible. The multiple structure of the IRc2 source, the new limits on the size of the components, and the positional correlations draw into question the previous hypothesis that a single, very luminous source dominates the energetics of the BN-KL nebula.