Rotational Line Emission from Water in Protoplanetary Disks

Abstract

Circumstellar disks provide the material reservoir for the growth of young stars and for planet formation. We combine a high-level radiative transfer program with a thermal-chemical model of a typical T Tauri star disk to investigate the diagnostic potential of the far-infrared lines of water for probing disk structure. We discuss the observability of pure rotational H2O lines with the Herschel Space Observatory, specifically the residual gas where water is mainly frozen out. We find that measuring both the line profile of the ground 110-101 ortho-H2O transition and the ratio of this line to the 312-303 and 221-212 line can provide information on the gas phase water between 5-100 AU, but not on the snow line which is expected to occur at smaller radii.

5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted by ApJL

References in corpus (6)

• Analytical protostellar disk models 1: the effect of internal dissipation and surface irradiation on the structure of disks and the location of the snow line around Sun-like stars
• H2O and OH gas in the terrestrial planet-forming zones of protoplanetary disks
• On the Location of the Snow Line in a Protoplanetary Disk
• Chemistry and line emission from evolving Herbig Ae disks
• Atomic Diagnostics of X-ray Irradiated Protoplanetary Disks
• Line profiles of water for the photon dominated region and embedded sources in the S140 region