The Foggy Disks Surrounding Herbig Ae Stars: a Theoretical Study of the
  H2O Line Spectra
  Water is a key species in many astrophysical environments, but it is
particularly important in proto-planetary disks. So far,observations of water
in these objects have been scarce, but the situation should soon change thanks
to the Herschel satellite. We report here a theoretical study of the water line
spectrum of a proto-planetary disk surrounding Ae stars. We show that several
lines will be observable with the HIFI instrument onboard the Herschel Space
Observatory. We predict that some maser lines could also be observable with
ground telescopes and we discuss how the predictions depend not only on the
adopted physical and chemical model but also on the set of collisional
coefficients used and on the H2 ortho to para ratio through its effect on
collisional excitation. This makes the water lines observations a powerful, but
dangerous -if misused- diagnostic tool.
