Candidate Water Vapor Lines to Locate the H$_{2}$O Snowline through High-Dispersion Spectroscopic Observations I. The Case of a T Tauri Star

TL;DR

This study identifies specific water vapor emission lines suitable for high-dispersion spectroscopy to locate the H$_{2}$O snowline in protoplanetary disks, aiding understanding of planet formation and water distribution.

Contribution

It proposes candidate water lines with specific properties for future observations to pinpoint the H$_{2}$O snowline in disks around T Tauri stars.

Findings

High water vapor abundance both inside the snowline and in the outer disk surface layer.

Identified water lines with small Einstein A coefficients and high upper state energies.

Candidate lines are accessible with ALMA and future infrared spectrographs.

Abstract

Inside the H$_{2}$O snowline of protoplanetary disks, water evaporates from the dust-grain surface into the gas phase, whereas it is frozen out on to the dust in the cold region beyond the snowline. H$_{2}$O ice enhances the solid material in the cold outer part of a disk, which promotes the formation of gas-giant planet cores. We can regard the H$_{2}$O snowline as the surface that divides the regions between rocky and gaseous giant planet formation. Thus observationally measuring the location of the H$_{2}$O snowline is crucial for understanding the planetesimal and planet formation processes, and the origin of water on Earth. In this paper, we find candidate water lines to locate the H$_{2}$O snowline through future high-dispersion spectroscopic observations. First, we calculate the chemical composition of the disk and investigate the abundance distributions of H$_{2}$O gas and ice, and the position of the H$_{2}$O snowline. We confirm that the abundance of H$_{2}$O gas is high not only in the hot midplane region inside the H$_{2}$O snowline but also in the hot surface layer of the outer disk. Second, we calculate the H$_{2}$O line profiles and identify those H$_{2}$O lines which are promising for locating the H$_{2}$O snowline: the identified lines are those which have small Einstein $A$ coefficients and high upper state energies. The wavelengths of the candidate H$_{2}$O lines range from mid-infrared to sub-millimeter, and they overlap with the regions accessible to ALMA and future mid-infrared high dispersion spectrographs (e.g., TMT/MICHI, SPICA).