The 10-m telescope at the Caltech Owens Valley Radio Observatory has been used to make 26-arcsec resolution observations at 230 GHz. The circumstellar cloud in IRC + 10216 was fully resolved and mapped using the J = 2-1 line of CO; the emission is found to be centrally peaked and circularly symmetric. The extended emission may imply that the stellar mass loss was more rapid in the past. Also observed were three other circumstellar sources (CIT 6, CRL 2688, and NGC 7027). In each case the CO(2-1) line intensity is unexpectedly high.
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Wannier et al. (1979) studied this question.