English

Observations of the planetary nebula RWT 152 with OSIRIS/GTC

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2016-08-17 v1

Abstract

RWT 152 is one of the few known planetary nebulae with an sdO central star. We present subarcsecond red tunable filter Halpha imaging and intermediate-resolution, long-slit spectroscopy of RWT 152 obtained with OSIRIS/GTC with the goal of analyzing its properties. The Halpha image reveals a bipolar nebula with a bright equatorial region and multiple bubbles in the main lobes. A faint circular halo surrounds the main nebula. The nebular spectra reveal a very low-excitation nebula with weak emission lines from H^+, He^+, and double-ionized metals, and absence of emission lines from neutral and single-ionized metals, except for an extremely faint [NII]6584 emission line. These spectra may be explained if RWT 152 is a density-bounded planetary nebula. Low nebular chemical abundances of S, O, Ar, N, and Ne are obtained in RWT 152, which, together with the derived high peculiar velocity (\sim 92-131 km s1^{-1}), indicate that this object is a halo planetary nebula. The available data are consistent with RWT 152 evolving from a low-mass progenitor (\sim 1 M_{\odot}) formed in a metal-poor environment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.01258,
  title  = {Observations of the planetary nebula RWT 152 with OSIRIS/GTC},
  author = {A. Aller and L. F. Miranda and L. Olguín and E. Solano and A. Ulla},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.01258},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

10 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS