Related papers: Observational Confirmation of a Link Between Commo…
Shaping axi-symmetric planetary nebulae is easier if a companion interacts with a primary at the top of the asymptotic giant branch. To determine the impact of binarity on planetary nebula formation and shaping, we need to determine the…
It is already known that about 10% of central stars of PNe are very short-period binaries (hours to days), which are detected through photometric variations. These must have been formed through common-envelope interactions in initially wide…
We present a detailed study of the binary central star of the planetary nebula ETHOS 1 (PN G068.1+11.0). Simultaneous modelling of light and radial velocity curves reveals the binary to comprise a hot and massive pre-white-dwarf with an…
We consider the possibility of cluster membership for 13 planetary nebulae that are located in close proximity to open clusters lying in their lines of sight. The short lifetimes and low sample size of intermediate-mass planetary nebulae…
We find the central stars of the planetary nebulae (PNe) HaTr 7 and ESO 330-9 to be close binary systems. Both have orbital periods of less than half a day and contain an irradiated cool companion to the hot central star. We provide light…
We present the first detailed spatio-kinematical analysis and modelling of the planetary nebula HaTr 4, one of few known to contain a post-common-envelope central star system. Common envelope evolution is believed to play an important role…
We study the bending of jets in binary stellar systems. A compact companion accretes mass from the slow wind of the mass-losing primary star, forms an accretion disk, and blows two opposite jets. These fast jets are bent by the slow wind.…
We report results of an HST "snapshot" survey aimed at finding resolved binary companions of the central stars of Galactic planetary nebulae (PNe). Using WF/PC and WFPC2, we searched the fields of 113 PNe for stars whose close proximity to…
We examine recent studies on the formation rate of planetary nebulae and find this rate to be about one-third of the formation rate of white dwarfs. This implies than only about one-third of all planetary nebulae that evolve to form white…
The discrepancy between abundances computed using optical recombination lines (ORLs) and collisionally excited lines (CELs) is a major unresolved problem in nebular astrophysics. We show here that the largest abundance discrepancies are…
It is not yet clear whether magnetic fields play an essential role in shaping planetary nebulae (PNe), or whether stellar rotation alone and/or a close binary companion can account for the variety of the observed nebular morphologies. In a…
A consensus has been reached in recent years that binarity plays an important role in the formation and evolution of a significant fraction of planetary nebulae (PNe). Utilizing the archived photometric data from the Zwicky Transient…
Recent studies show that more than 70% of massive stars do not evolve as effectively single stars, but as members of interacting binary systems. The evolution of these stars is thus strongly altered compared to similar but isolated objects.…
Studies of the relationship between planetary nebula morphology and the evolution of the central stars has long suffered from uncertainties in distance determinations, and from the bias of interstellar absorption, that are typical for…
Recent work (Corradi et al. 2015, Jones et al. 2016) has shown that the phenomenon of extreme abundance discrepancies, where recombination line abundances exceed collisionally excited line abundances by factors of 10 or more, seem to be…
The morphologies of planetary nebula have long been believed to be due to wind shaping processes in which a fast wind from the central star impacts a previously ejected envelope. Asymmetries assumed to exist in the slow wind envelope lead…
Planetary Nebulae are the ionised ejected envelopes surrounding the remnant cores of dying stars. Theory predicts that main-sequence stars with one to about eight times the mass of our sun may eventually form planetary nebulae. Until now no…
Six planetary nebulae (PN) are known in the Kepler space telescope field of view, three newly identified. Of the 5 central stars of PN with useful Kepler data, one, J193110888+4324577, is a short-period, post common envelope binary…
Binary-binary interactions are important in a number of astrophysical contexts including dense stellar systems such as globular clusters. Although less frequent than binary-single encounters, binary-binary interactions lead to a much richer…
Binarity and mass transfer appear to play a key role in the shaping and, possibly, formation of planetary nebulae (PNe), thereby explaining the large fraction of axisymmetric morphologies. I present the binary hypothesis for PNe and its…