The two central stars of NGC 1514: can they actually be related?

Abstract

The central star of the planetary nebula NGC 1514 is among the visually brightest central stars in the sky (V=9.5). It has long been known to show a composite spectrum, consisting of an A-type star and a much hotter star responsible for the ionization of the surrounding nebula. These two stars have always been assumed to form a binary system. High-resolution spectrograms obtained with Espadons at the CFHT on Mauna Kea have allowed to measure good radial velocities for both stars. They differ by 13 $\pm$ 2 km s${}^{-1}$. The stellar velocities have not changed after 500 days. We have also estimated the metallicity of the cooler star. Combining these data with other information available in the literature, we conclude that, unless all the published nebular radial velocities are systematically wrong, the cooler star is just a chance alignment, and the two stars are not orbiting each other. The cooler star cannot have played any role in the formation of NGC 1514.

arXiv commentAccepted by ApJ, in press; 12 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• A Hubble Space Telescope Survey for Resolved Companions of Planetary-Nebula Nuclei
• Quantitative Spectroscopy of 24 A supergiants in the Sculptor galaxy NGC 300: Flux weighted gravity luminosity relationship, metallicity and metallicity gradient
• Quantitative Spectroscopy of BA-type Supergiants
• Quantitative Spectroscopy of Blue Supergiant Stars in the Disk of M81: Metallicity, Metallicity Gradient and Distance
• Spectral analysis of BD+30${}^{\circ }$623, the peculiar binary central star of the planetary nebula NGC 1514

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Catalogue of central stars of planetary nebulae: Expanded edition
• The long-period binary central stars of the planetary nebulae NGC 1514 and LoTr 5
• The Gaia Data Release 1 parallaxes and the distance scale of Galactic planetary nebulae
• The morpho-kinematical structure and chemical abundances of the complex planetary nebula NGC 1514
• Central Stars of Planetary Nebulae