Locating the Launching Region of T Tauri Winds: The Case of DG Tauri

Abstract

It is widely believed that T Tauri winds are driven magnetocentrifugally from accretion disks close to the central stars. The exact launching conditions are uncertain. We show that a general relation exists between the poloidal and toroidal velocity components of a magnetocentrifugal wind at large distances and the rotation rate of the launching surface, independent of the uncertain launching conditions. We discuss the physical basis of this relation and verify it using a set of numerically-determined large-scale wind solutions. Both velocity components are in principle measurable from spatially resolved spectra, as has been done for the extended low-velocity component (LVC) of the DG Tau wind by Bacciotti et al. For this particular source, we infer that the spatially resolved LVC originates from a region on the disk extending from $\sim 0.3$ to $\sim 4.0\AU$ from the star, which is consistent with, and a refinement over, the previous rough estimate of Bacciotti et al.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letter