H2O line emission from shocked gas

The H2O emission expected from a hot astrophysical plasma containing water is computed to obtain (1) a general cooling function for water, and (2) the individual H2O line intensities in the specific case of the shocked gas region in Orion-KL. It is found that for a shocked molecular region, such as has been previously proposed to account for H2, CO, and O I observations of Orion-KL, there are several hundred H2O lines with fluxes that exceed 10 to the -18th W/sq cm into a 1 arcmin beam. Though the strongest of these generally correspond to strong terrestrial water absorption features, making their detection difficult, future balloon and space experiments should be capable of detecting a large number of water lines. An analytic fit to the total cooling due to water is obtained as a function of temperature, H2 density, and H2O column density. At large optical depth, the result exceeds significantly that obtained from the 'universal cooling function' of Hollenbach and McKee (1979).