Related papers: On determining the chemical composition of planeta…
Detections of molecular lines, mainly from H2$ and CO, reveal molecular material in planetary nebulae. Observations of a variety of molecules suggest that the molecular composition in these objects differs from that found in interstellar…
We have analyzed the effects of photoelectric heating by dust grains in photoionization models of planetary nebulae. We have shown that this process is particularly important if planetary nebulae contain a population of small grains. The…
Context: In recent years mid- and far infrared spectra of planetary nebulae have been analysed and lead to more accurate abundances. It may be expected that these better abundances lead to a better understanding of the evolution of these…
This paper presents a homogeneous study of abundances in a sample of 79 northern galactic planetary nebulae whose morphological classes have been uniformly determined. Ionic abundances and plasma diagnostics were derived from selected…
In this paper we discuss the calculation of chemical abundances in planetary nebulae and H II regions through ionization correction factors (ICFs). We review the first ICFs proposed in the literature based on ionization potential…
We present an analysis of physical conditions in planetary nebulae (PNe) in terms of collisionally-excited line (CEL) and optical-recombination line (ORL) profiles. We aim to investigate whether line profiles could be used to study the…
ISO and IUE spectra of the round planetary nebula Me 2-1 are combined with visual spectra taken from the literature to obtain for the first time a complete extinction-corrected spectrum. With this, the physico-chemical characteristics of…
Deep spectrophotometry has proved to be a fundamental tool to improve our knowledge on the chemical content of planetary nebulae. With the arrival of very efficient spectrographs installed in the largest ground-based telescopes, outstanding…
Estimates of the gas temperature in planetary nebulae obtained from the [O III] emission line ratio and from the Balmer discontinuity indicate differences reaching up to 6000 K (Liu and Danziger 1993). The [O III] temperature is commonly…
The errors inherent to the use of the standard "ionization correction factor" ("i_CF") method of calculating nebular conditions and relative abundances of H, He, N, O, Ne, S, and Ar in emission line nebulae have been investigated under…
We investigate the variations of the radial O/H abundance gradients from planetary nebulae (PN) located at different distances from the galactic plane. In particular, we determine the abundance gradients at different heights from the plane…
[Abridged] Investigations of neutron(n)-capture element nucleosynthesis and chemical evolution have largely been based on stellar spectroscopy. However, the recent detection of these elements in several planetary nebulae (PNe) indicates…
This paper represents the conclusion of a project that had two main goals: (1) to investigate to what extent planetary nebulae (PNe) are chemically homogeneous; and (2) to provide physical constraints on the central star properties of each…
It is argued that an important fraction of PNe present large temperature variations that are not due to observational errors nor to incomplete atomic physics. Seven possible causes for these variations are reviewed, one of them is presented…
Using ab-initio photoionization models of giant HII regions, we test methods for abundance determinations based on a direct measurement of the electron temperature, now possible even for moderate to high-metallicity objects. We find that,…
The discrepancy between abundances computed using optical recombination lines (ORLs) and collisionally excited lines (CELs) is a major, unresolved problem with significant implications for the determination of chemical abundances throughout…
In this work we report spectrophotometric observations of a planetary nebula sample towards the galactic bulge. A total of 45 PNe was observed and their physical parameters (electron density and temperature) were derived. Ionic abundances…
The measurement of chemical abundances in planetary nebulae in nearby galaxies is now relatively straightforward. The challenge is to use these chemical abundances to infer the chemical evolution of their host galaxies. At this point, our…
We have conducted a large-scale survey of 120 planetary nebulae (PNe) to search for the near-infrared emission lines [Kr III] 2.199 and [Se IV] 2.287 microns. The neutron(n)-capture elements Se and Kr may be enriched in a PN if its…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) constitute an important tool to study the chemical evolution of the Milky Way and other galaxies, probing the nucleosynthesis processes, abundance gradients and the chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium. In…