paper

The missing mass conundrum of post-common-envelope planetary nebulae

arXiv:1810.09296 · doi:10.1017/S1743921318005495

Abstract

Most planetary nebulae (PNe) show beautiful, axisymmetric morphologies despite their progenitor stars being essentially spherical. Angular momentum provided by a close binary companion is widely invoked as the main agent that would help eject an axisymmetric nebula, after a brief phase of engulfment of the secondary within the envelope of the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) star, known as a common envelope (CE). The evolution of the AGB would be thus interrupted abruptly, its (still quite) massive envelope fully ejected to form the PN, which should be more massive than a PN coming from the same star were it single. We test this hypothesis by deriving the ionised+molecular masses of a pilot sample of post-CE PNe and comparing them to a regular PNe sample. We find the mass of post-CE PNe to be actually lower, on average, than their regular counterparts, raising some doubts on our understanding of these intriguing objects.

4 pages, 1 figure, to appear on the proceedings of the IAU Symposium 343: "Why Galaxies Care About AGB Stars: A Continuing Challenge through Cosmic Time"

References in corpus (8)