IRS Detections of Water Vapor in Protoplanetary Disks
First Author:
Colette Salyk
Email: csalyk AT gps.caltech.edu
Caltech
1200 E California Blvd
MC 150-21
Pasadena CA 91125 USA
Coauthors:
G.A. Blake, Caltech
K.M. Pontoppidan, Caltech
F. Lahuis, SRON / Leiden Observatory,
E.F. van Dishoeck, Leiden Observatory
N.J. Evans II, Univ. of Texas
Abstract
Recent Spitzer InfraRed Spectrograph (IRS) detections of water and organic molecules in protoplanetary disks (Carr & Najita 2008, Salyk et al. 2008) represent a turning point in the study of the physical and chemical development of terrestrial planet-forming regions. Here we present Spitzer-IRS spectra obtained from the ``cores to disks'' (c2d) Legacy program, which demonstrate a high detection rate for hot (T ~1000 K) water vapor emission lines in the 10-20 um region covered by the ShortHi module. We also present complementary ground-based L-band (~3 um) observations obtained with NIRSPEC (R ~25,000) on the Keck II telescope and CRIRES (R ~100,000) at the VLT at sufficiently high spectral resolution to measure the line shapes and thus constrain the emitting locations in the disks. Preliminary results suggest a variety ofmolecular abundance ratios, which may indicate differences in disk evolutionary states, or intrinsic differences between sources. We explore and present these possibilities and other characteristics of this rich sample. Finally, we discuss these results in the context of ongoing GO-5 IRS observations designed to span an expansive range in disk activity and physical state at high S/N (program PID #50641, J. Carr, Principal Investigator).
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