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Deuterium-enriched water ties planet-forming disks to comets and protostars

Nature volume 615, pages 227–230 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Water is a fundamental molecule in the star and planet formation process, essential for catalysing the growth of solid material and the formation of planetesimals within disks1,2. However, the water snowline and the HDO:H2O ratio within proto-planetary disks have not been well characterized because water only sublimates at roughly 160 K (ref. 3), meaning that most water is frozen out onto dust grains and that the water snowline radii are less than 10 AU (astronomical units)4,5. The sun-like protostar V883 Ori (M* = 1.3 M⊙)6 is undergoing an accretion burst7, increasing its luminosity to roughly 200 L⊙ (ref. 8), and previous observations suggested that its water snowline is 40–120 AU in radius6,9,10. Here we report the direct detection of gas phase water (HDO and \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\)) from the disk of V883 Ori. We measure a midplane water snowline radius of approximately 80 AU, comparable to the scale of the Kuiper Belt, and detect water out to a radius of roughly 160 AU. We then measure the HDO:H2O ratio of the disk to be (2.26 ± 0.63) × 10−3. This ratio is comparable to those of protostellar envelopes and comets, and exceeds that of Earth’s oceans by 3.1σ. We conclude that disks directly inherit water from the star-forming cloud and this water becomes incorporated into large icy bodies, such as comets, without substantial chemical alteration.

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Fig. 1: Illustrations comparing a typical proto-planetary disk and the disk surrounding the outbursting protostar V883 Ori.
Fig. 2: Integrated intensity images of water and other molecular lines in the disk of V883 Ori.
Fig. 3: Radial column density measurements of water and the HDO:H2O ratio along with their disk-averaged measurements.
Fig. 4: HDO:H2O ratio for Class 0 protostars, V883 Ori, Jupiter Family comets (JFC, with 67P labelled), Oort Cloud comets (OCC), Earth’s oceans, the Sun and the local ISM.

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Data availability

The images used for analysis in the paper are available in the Harvard Dataverse repository (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MDQJEU), along with the reduction scripts used to process the ALMA visibility data and create images. Owing to their size, the raw (and ALMA-pipeline-calibrated) visibility data are only available from the ALMA science archive (https://almascience.nrao.edu/aq/).

Code availability

Codes used for analysis are available in the Harvard Dataverse repository (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MDQJEU), along with the ALMA images used for analysis. Documentation and requirements for various parts of the code are documented.

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Acknowledgements

This paper makes use of the following ALMA data: ADS/JAO.ALMA#2021.1.00186.S. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), National Science Federation (NSF) (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This research made use of APLpy, an open-source plotting package for Python56, Astropy (http://www.astropy.org), a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy57,58, the Python package spectral-cube (https://github.com/radio-astro-tools/spectral-cube) and matplotlib colour maps from the Python package cmocean59. J.J.T. acknowledges support from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and NASA XRP 80NSSC22K1159. M.L.R.v.H. acknowledges support from the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. M.L. acknowledges support from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) grant no. 618.000.001. E.F.v.D. acknowledges support the NWO, EU A-ERC grant no. 101019751 MOLDISK and the Danish National Research Foundation ‘InterCat’ grant (no. DNRF150). T.P.-C. acknowledges support from the European Southern Observatory. P.D.S. acknowledges support from NSF grant no. AST-2001830. D.H. is supported by Centre for Informatics and Computation in Astronomy and grant no. 110J0353I9 from the Ministry of Education of Taiwan. D.H. acknowledges support from the Ministry of Science of Technology of Taiwan through grant no. 111B3005191. L.C. acknowledges support from FONDECYT grant no. 1211656 and the Millennium Nucleus YEMS, NCN2021-080, from ANID, Chile. L.I.C. gratefully acknowledges support from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and NASA ATP 80NSSC20K0529. K.F. acknowledges support from JSPS KAKENHI grant nos. 20H05847 and 21K13967.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    John J. Tobin

  2. Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Merel L. R. van ’t Hoff

  3. Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Margot Leemker, Ewine F. van Dishoeck & Teresa Paneque-Carreño

  4. European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany

    Teresa Paneque-Carreño

  5. National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Japan

    Kenji Furuya

  6. Institute of Astronomy, Department of Physics, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Daniel Harsono

  7. Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala Space Observatory, Onsala, Sweden

    Magnus V. Persson

  8. Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    L. Ilsedore Cleeves

  9. Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astronomy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Patrick D. Sheehan

  10. Núcleo de Astronomı́a, Facultad de Ingenierı́a y Ciencias, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile

    Lucas Cieza

  11. Millennium Nucleus on Young Exoplanets and their Moons (YEMS), Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile

    Lucas Cieza

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  1. John J. Tobin
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Contributions

J.J.T. wrote the main text and led the data analysis. M.L.R.v.H. assisted with the analysis and writing. M.L. assisted with the snowline analysis and writing T.P.-C. assisted with the snowline analysis and writing. E.F.v.D. and K.F. contributed to the interpretation of results. M.V.P. created two of the figures and contributed to the interpretation of results. L.I.C., D.H., P.D.S. and L.C. contributed to the interpretation of the results and the proofing of the manuscript. All authors contributed to obtaining the observations.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to John J. Tobin.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Channel maps of HDO 225 and 241 GHz emission.

The data are shown by the colour scale, the Keplerian mask is drawn as a heavy white line, and the mask corresponding to the blueshifted CH3OCHO line (Extended Data Fig. 4) is drawn as a heavy blue line for HDO 225 GHz and CH3CHO for HDO 241 GHz. The continuum peak/protostar position is marked by the white cross. The channels nearest the velocity of V883 Ori (4.25 km s−1) are marked with a star in the upper right corner. The synthesized beam is also drawn in the lower left corner of each panel.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Channel maps of \({{{\bf{H}}}_{{\bf{2}}}}^{{\bf{18}}}{\bf{O}}\) 203 GHz emission.

The data are shown by the colour scale, the Keplerian mask for \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) is drawn as a heavy white line, and the masks corresponding to the two blueshifted and one redshifted CH3OCH3 lines (Extended Data Fig. 4) are drawn as heavy blue and red lines, respectively. The continuum peak/protostar position is marked by the white cross and the channels nearest the velocity of V883 Ori (4.25 km s−1) are marked with a star in the upper right corner. Despite the faintness of the \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) line and its location between nearby COM lines, the detection of \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) is unambiguous given that its emission is detected in the expected channels for the given protostar mass. The channels with >3σ detections within the Keplerian masks are marked with asterisks in the lower right corner. The synthesized beam is drawn in the lower left corner of each panel.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Integrated intensity images of HDO and \({{{\bf{H}}}_{{\bf{2}}}}^{{\bf{18}}}{\bf{O}}\).

The HDO 241 GHz integrated intensity map created using a Keplerian mask identical to the HDO 225 GHz and \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) lines is shown in a, the HDO 241 GHz integrated intensity image between 5.05 and 7.05 km s−1 is shown in b, the HDO 225 GHz integrated intensity image using the same velocity range is shown in c, and the \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) integrated intensity image from the same velocity range is shown in d. The contours shown in b–d are from the \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) image and show the intensity levels 3 and 5 times the noise (s.d.), where 1 s.d. is 0.00158 Jy beam−1 km s−1, and the integrated intensity images in these panels were computed without the use of masks or any other clipping. The 5.05 to 7.05 km s−1 velocity range had minimal contamination from other lines for HDO and \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) and effectively demonstrates the significance of the \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) detection. The extent of the continuum emission from the disk is denoted by the white contour and the position of the protostar is marked with the white cross. The HDO 241 GHz line shows very similar structure to the HDO 225 GHz line that is shown in Fig. 2 in the main text, and the dotted line in a shows the region over which the integrated intensity image was computed using the Keplerian mask. The depression in the centre of the line emission in a is the result of optically thick continuum absorbing the line emission in the inner ~ 0.1″ (40 au). The extent of this optically thick region is denoted with the thick grey line in the centre of each image. The ellipses in the lower right corner denote the resolution of the line observation (orange, ~ 0.1″) and the continuum data (white, ~ 0.08″).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Integrated spectra of V883 Ori centered on the HDO 225 GHz, HDO 241 GHz, and \({{{\bf{H}}}_{{\bf{2}}}}^{{\bf{18}}}{\bf{O}}\) 203 GHz lines.

Panels a, c, e show the spectra as observed (disk rotation causes all spectral lines to have a double-peaked line profile), while panels b, d, f show the stacked spectra40,41 with the Keplerian rotation profile removed. The root mean squared (RMS) noise of the HDO 225 GHz, HDO 241 GHz, and \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) are 0.016, 0.017, and 0.011 Jy, respectively. The HDO lines are the brightest features around their centre frequencies, but both have contaminating emission from COM species nearby. The \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) line is faint relative to its surrounding features but is still clearly detected. We are able to model the spectral profiles for HDO, \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\), and the contaminating lines to measure their line fluxes using an optically-thin synthetic spectral model for a disk (Extended Data Fig. 5). In a, c, e, the observed spectrum is drawn as the black line, the model of the contaminating lines is drawn as an orange line, the model HDO and \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) lines are drawn as blue lines, and the total model of contaminating lines with HDO and \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) is drawn as a green line. The rise seen toward higher frequencies on the \({{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}^{18}{\rm{O}}\) spectrum (e) is another CH3OCH3 line that peaks outside the shown region. The spectra are plotted at their observed frequencies and are not corrected for the system local standard of rest (LSR) velocity of ~ 4.25 km s−1.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Plot of template spectra derived from the LIME radiative transfer model and from the observed isolated methanol lines.

The main difference between the templates is at the centre of the line profile where the methanol line has a much more shallow dip owing to line optical depth, while the optically thin LIME model has a much deeper dip at the centre and sharper peaks.

Extended Data Table 1 Spectral setup
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Extended Data Table 2 Keplerian mask parameters
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Extended Data Table 3 Spectral lines blended with HDO and \({{{\bf{H}}}_{{\bf{2}}}}^{{\bf{18}}}{\bf{O}}\)
Full size table
Extended Data Table 4 Impact of different spectral models on line flux
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Extended Data Table 5 D/H measurements
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Tobin, J.J., van ’t Hoff, M.L.R., Leemker, M. et al. Deuterium-enriched water ties planet-forming disks to comets and protostars. Nature 615, 227–230 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05676-z

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