Current Unsolved Problems in Planetary Nebulae Research
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
2026-04-28 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies
Abstract
While there has been significant progress in our understanding of the origin and evolu-tion of planetary nebulae in the last 50 years, there remain several unsolved problems. These include the true 3D morphological structure of the nebulae, origin of multipolar nebulae, the dust and molecular distribution relative to the optical nebulosity, large-scale structures outside of the main nebulae, the relevance of binarity to planetary nebulae evolution, and a precise definition of the planetary nebula phenomenon. The long-standing problem of elemental abundance discrepancy still remains unsolved. In this paper, we summarize current observations related to these problems and present possible future directions to tackle them.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.22999,
title = {Current Unsolved Problems in Planetary Nebulae Research},
author = {Sun Kwok and Bruce Balick and You-Hua Chu and Bruce J. Hrivnak and Alberto López and Quentin Parker and Raghvendra Sahai and Albert Zijlstra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.22999},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
30 pages, 16 figures