Ancient 'ghost' planetary nebulae discovered with amateur telescopes

Abstract

As planetary nebulae evolve, they fade and dissipate into the surrounding interstellar medium making them harder to detect. Modern, advanced amateur equipment can help to uncover this hidden population of ancient 'ghost' planetary nebulae. Via careful processing of long-integration, narrow-band imagery with modest aperture telescopes at a dark-sky site, we reveal three new candidate planetary nebulae (JAM 2, JAM 3, and JAM 4). Each measures several arcminutes across with [O iii] surface brightnesses of order 30 mag arcsec${}^{-2}$. For each nebula, we identify a candidate central star, the parallaxes of which lead to nebular age estimates in the range 50-100 thousand years. The candidate central star of JAM 2 also shows indications of photometric variability, potentially due to spots on the stellar surface.

A&A accepted

References in corpus (29)

• Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
• Measuring Reddening with SDSS Stellar Spectra and Recalibrating SFD
• The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package
• Gaia Data Release 3: Summary of the content and survey properties
• Binary companions of evolved stars in APOGEE DR14: Search method and catalog of ~5,000 companions
• A new extensive library of PHOENIX stellar atmospheres and synthetic spectra
• Estimating distances from parallaxes. V: Geometric and photogeometric distances to 1.47 billion stars in Gaia Early Data Release 3
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive
• New models for the evolution of Post-Asymptotic Giant Branch stars and Central Stars of Planetary Nebulae
• Post-Asymptotic Giant Branch Evolution of Low- and Intermediate-Mass Stars. Preliminary Results
• A catalogue of white dwarfs in Gaia EDR3
• An Analysis of the Shapes of Interstellar Extinction Curves. VII. Milky Way Spectrophotometric Optical-through-Ultraviolet Extinction and Its R-Dependence
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: Summary of the contents and survey properties
• CARMENES input catalogue of M dwarfs V. Luminosities, colours, and spectral energy distributions
• HASH: the Hong Kong/AAO/Strasbourg H-alpha planetary nebula database
• The interaction of planetary nebulae and their AGB progenitors with the interstellar medium
• New evolutionary sequences for hot H-deficient white dwarfs on the basis of a full account of progenitor evolution
• The population of hot subdwarf stars studied with Gaia -- IV. Catalogues of hot subluminous stars based on Gaia EDR3
• Searching for Faint Planetary Nebulae Using the Digital Sky Survey
• On helium-dominated stellar evolution: the mysterious role of the O(He)-type stars
• A proto-helium white dwarf stripped by a substellar companion via common-envelope ejection -- Uncovering the true nature of a candidate hypervelocity B-type star
• A Plague of Magnetic Spots Among the Hot Stars of Globular Clusters
• The Planetary Nebula in the 500 Myr old Open Cluster M37
• The bright blue side of the night sky: Spectroscopic survey of bright and hot (pre-) white dwarfs
• Mysterious, Variable, and Extremely Hot: White Dwarfs Showing Ultra-High Excitation Lines I. Photometric Variability
• Probing the non-thermal physics of stellar bow shocks using radio observations
• Hot white dwarfs and pre-white dwarfs discovered with SALT
• Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet spectroscopy of the hottest known helium-rich pre-white dwarf KPD0005+5106
• Non-local thermodynamic equilibrium spectral analysis of five hot, hydrogen-deficient pre-white dwarfs