Today's Colloquium: Waterfalls, fountains and water bombs: infall, outflows and shocks in solar-mass protostars traced by rotational lines of water

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Clik here to view.© Ruud Visser

Water is a unique probe of gas motion in protostellar environments, allowing us to trace kinematics in star forming regions from cloud to the inner envelope (< 1000 AU) scales. With Herschel-HIFI we have access to velocity-resolved observations of numerous transitions of H2O and other molecules, which probe both the cold and warm gas, for the first time. These are enabling us to disentangle the various infall, outflow and shock physics and kinematics of protostars.

I will present analysis of HIFI water line profiles from the large WISH and WILL surveys of ~75 young lowmass YSOs. These will be placed within the context of ground based (J<=6) and Herschel (J>=5) CO observations, showing that both the HIFI water observations allow us to probe new components of the gas not previously observed from the ground.

The combination of the new and previously observed kinematic features probe all of the major components of protostellar systems, allowing a holistic study of infall, outflows and shocks as a function of source properties and evolutionary stage.