Thermal Water Vapor Emission from Shocked Regions in Orion

Using the Long Wavelength Spectrometer (LWS) onboard the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), we have observed thermal water vapor emission from a roughly circular field of view approximately 75 arc seconds in diameter centered on the Orion BN-KL region. The Fabry-Perot line strengths, line widths, and spectral line shifts observed in eight transitions between 71 and 125μm show good agreement with models of thermal emission arising from a molecular cloud subjected to a magnetohydrodynamic C-type shock. Both the breadth and the relative strengths of the observed lines argue for emission from a shock rather than from warm quiescent gas in the Orion core. Though one of the eight transitions appears anomalously strong, and may be subject to the effects of radiative pumping, the other seven indicate an H2O/H2 abundance ratio of order 5 × 10, and a corresponding gas-phase oxygen-to-hydrogen abundance