The Foggy Disks Surrounding Herbig Ae Stars: a Theoretical Study of the H2O Line Spectra

Abstract

Water is a key species in many astrophysical environments, but it is particularly important in proto-planetary disks. So far,observations of water in these objects have been scarce, but the situation should soon change thanks to the Herschel satellite. We report here a theoretical study of the water line spectrum of a proto-planetary disk surrounding Ae stars. We show that several lines will be observable with the HIFI instrument onboard the Herschel Space Observatory. We predict that some maser lines could also be observable with ground telescopes and we discuss how the predictions depend not only on the adopted physical and chemical model but also on the set of collisional coefficients used and on the H2 ortho to para ratio through its effect on collisional excitation. This makes the water lines observations a powerful, but dangerous -if misused- diagnostic tool.

Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Sensitive limits on the abundance of cold water vapor in the DM Tau protoplanetary disk
• Consistent dust and gas models for protoplanetary disks: II. Chemical networks and rates
• GASPS observations of Herbig Ae/Be stars with PACS/Herschel. The atomic and molecular content of their protoplanetary discs
• Detection of warm water vapour in Taurus protoplanetary discs by Herschel
• Continuum and line modelling of discs around young stars. I. 300000 disc models for Herschel/GASPS
• The rotational excitation of HCN and HNC by He: New insights on the HCN/HNC abundance ratio in molecular clouds
• Continuum and line modeling of disks around young stars II. Line diagnostics for GASPS from the DENT grid
• Rotating Disks and Non-Kinematic Double Peaks
• On the influence of collisional rate coefficients on the water vapour excitation