Context. Determining the gas density and temperature structures of protoplanetary disks is a fundamental task to constrain planet formation theories. This is a challenging procedure and most determinations are based on model-dependent assumptions. Aims. We attempt a direct determination of the radial and vertical temperature structure of the Flying Saucer disk, thanks to its favorable inclination of 90 degrees. Methods. We present a method based on the tomographic study of an edge-on disk. Using ALMA, we observe at 0.5 resolution the Flying Saucer in CO J=2-1 and CS J=5-4. This edge-on disk appears in silhouette against the CO J=2-1 emission from background molecular clouds in ρ Oph. The combination of velocity gradients due to the Keplerian rotation of the disk and intensity variations in the CO background as a function of velocity provide a direct measure of the gas temperature as a function of radius and height above the disk mid-plane. Results. The overall thermal structure is consistent with model predictions, with a cold (< 15 − 12 K), CO-depleted mid-plane, and a warmer disk atmosphere. However, we find evidence for CO gas along the mid-plane beyond a radius of about 200 au, coincident with a change of grain properties. Such a behavior is expected in case of efficient rise of UV penetration re-heating the disk and thus allowing CO thermal desorption or favoring direct CO photo-desorption. CO is also detected up to 3-4 scale heights while CS is confined around 1 scale height above the mid-plane. The limits of the method due to finite spatial and spectral resolutions are also discussed. Conclusions. This method appears to be very promising to determine the gas structure of planet-forming disks, provided that the molecular data have an angular resolution which is high enough, of the order of 0.3 − 0.1 at the distance of the nearest star forming regions.

The BASECOL2012 database is a repository of collisional data and a web service within the Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre (VAMDC, http://www.vamdc.eu). It contains rate coefficients for the collisional excitation of rotational, ro-vibrational, vibrational, fine, and hyperfine levels of molecules by atoms, molecules, and electrons, as well as fine-structure excitation of some atoms that are relevant to interstellar and circumstellar astrophysical applications. Submissions of new published collisional rate coefficients sets are welcome, and they will be critically evaluated before inclusion in the database. In addition, BASECOL2012 provides spectroscopic data queried dynamically from various spectroscopic databases using the VAMDC technology. These spectroscopic data are conveniently matched to the in-house collisional excitation rate coefficients using the SPECTCOL sofware package (http:// vamdc.eu/software), and the combined sets of data can be downloaded from the BASECOL2012 website. As a partner of the VAMDC, BASECOL2012 is accessible from the general VAMDC portal (http://portal.vamdc.eu) and from user tools such as SPECTCOL.

We report on crossed-beam experiments and quantum-mechanical calculations performed on the CO(j=0) + H2(j=0) → CO(j=1) + H2(j=0) system. The experimental cross sections determined in the threshold region of the CO(j=0 → j=1) transition at 3.85  cm(-1) show resonance structures in good qualitative agreement with the theoretical ones. These results suggest that the potential energy surface which describes the CO-H2 van der Waals interaction should be reinvestigated for good quantitative agreement.

Scattering of H2 on CO is of great importance in astrophysics and also is a benchmark system for comparing theory to experiment. We present here a new 6-dimensional potential energy surface for the ground electronic state of H2-CO with an estimated uncertainty of about 0.6 cm−1 in the global minimum region, several times smaller than achieved earlier. This potential has been used in nearly exact 6-dimensional quantum scattering calculations to compute state-to-state cross-sections measured in low-energy crossed-beam experiments. Excellent agreement between theory and experiment has been achieved in all cases. We also show that the fully 6-dimensional approach is not needed with the current accuracy of experimental data since an equally good agreement with experiment was obtained using only a 4-dimensional treatment, which validates the rigid-rotor approach widely used in scattering calculations. This finding, which disagrees with some literature statements, is important since for larger systems full-dimensional scattering calculations are currently not possible.

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In this paper we report the first theoretical study of the title reaction. A global, single-valued model of the ground-state potential energy surface has been obtained by fitting to an extensive set of high-level ab initio calculations. The surface is found to be attractive apart from linear geometries where energy barriers appear due to conical intersections. This model was then used to calculate the reactive reactant state selected cross sections for collision energies ranging from threshold up to 4000 cm(-1). These calculations were performed using our version of the Baer's approach of the RIOSA-NIP method which is based on the use of a negative imaginary potential. We find that the reaction probability is extremely oscillatory as a function of kinetic energy as it is a case for insertion reactions with a low exoergicity. The resulting reaction rate coefficient is found to first increase slowly as a function of temperature up to a broad maximum around 20 K and then to decrease slowly when temperature keeps increasing.

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