Discovery of deuterated water in a young proto-planetary disk

Abstract

We report the first detection of the ground transition of the deuterated water at 464 GHz in the young proto-planetary disk surrounding the solar type protostar DM Tau. The line is observed in absorption against the continuum from the cold dust in the disk midplane, with a line to continuum ratio close to unity. The observation implies that deuterated gaseous water is present, with a relatively large abundance ($\sim 3\times 10^{-9}$), in the outer disk above the midplane, where the density is, within a factor ten, $\sim 10^6$ cm${}^{-3}$ and the temperature is lower than about 25 K. In these conditions, the H${}_2$O condensation timescale is much smaller than the DM Tau disk age, and, therefore, water should be fully frozen onto the grain mantles. We suggest that UV photons and/or X-rays sublimate part of the mantles re-injecting the ices into the gas phase. Even though there is currently no measurement of H${}_2$O, we provide arguments that the HDO/H${}_2$O ratio should be about 0.01 or larger, which would be hundreds of times larger than the values measured in Solar System objects. This suggests the need of strong caution in comparing and linking the HDO/H${}_2$O in Solar System and star forming environments.

Accepted to be published in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (4)

• First detection of triply-deuterated methanol
• A New Probe of the Planet-Forming Region in T Tauri Disks
• HDO abundance in the envelope of the solar-type protostar IRAS16293-2422
• Water emission in NGC1333-IRAS4: The physical structure of the envelope

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