Related papers: Planetary Nebulae as Mass Tracers in Galaxies
The Planetary Nebula Spectrograph is a dedicated instrument for measuring radial velocity of individual Planetary Nebulae (PNe) in galaxies. This new instrument is providing crucial data with which to probe the structure of dark halos in…
The origins of S0 galaxies remain obscure, with various mechanisms proposed for their formation, likely depending on environment. These mechanisms would imprint different signatures in the galaxies' stellar kinematics out to large radii,…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) are circumstellar gas ejected during an intense mass-losing phase in the the lives of asymptotic giant branch stars. PNe have a stunning variety of shapes, most of which are not spherically symmetric. The debate over…
Premise: This report is intended to provide useful background and information on how we find detect and compile Planetary Nebulae PNe candidates and then verify them. It is for postgraduate students entering the field and for more general…
The role of planetary nebulae as probes for the galactic chemical evolution is reviewed. Their abundances throughout the Galaxy are discussed for key elements, in particular oxygen and other alpha elements. The abundance distribution…
Close-binary central stars of planetary nebulae offer a unique tool with which to study the critical and yet poorly understood common-envelope phase of binary stellar evolution. Furthermore, as the nebula itself is thought to comprise the…
This review attempts to place the observations of extragalactic planetary nebulae in the context of galactic dynamics. From this point of view only the radial velocities of the PNe are important. We have built a specialised instrument to…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of extragalactic stellar populations. Indeed, in many systems, bright PNe are the only individual objects identifiable from the ground, and, even more often, they…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) can be used to trace intermediate and old stellar populations in galaxies and the intracluster medium out to approximately 20 Mpc. PNe can be easily identified with narrow-band surveys, and their chemical abundances…
Planetary nebulae (PNe) represent the near endpoints of evolution for stars of initial mass $\sim$1-8 $M_\odot$, wherein the envelope of an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star becomes photodissociated and ionized by high-energy radiation…
Extragalactic planetary nebulae (xPNe) in galaxies beyond the Local Universe serve as discrete tracers for studying the element abundances and kinematics of galaxies covering a wide range of morphologies and masses at a variety of angular…
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…
This review provides useful background and information on how we find, vet and compile Planetary Nebulae (PNe) candidates and verify them. It presents a summary of the known Galactic PNe population and their curation in the Hong…
Planetary nebulae (PN) represent the evolutionary fate of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stellar envelopes, thus are ideally suited to study the chemical impact of AGB stars. Stellar evolution predict elemental enrichment through the AGB…
We have observed planetary nebulae (PNe) in several early-type galaxies using new techniques on 4- to 8-meter-class telescopes. We obtain the first large data sets (~ 100 velocities each) of PN kinematics in galaxies at > 15 Mpc, and…
Galaxies are faint enough when one observes just their light distributions, but in studying their full dynamical structure the stars are spread over the six dimensions of phase space rather than just the three spatial dimensions, making…
Our understanding of planetary nebulae has been significantly enhanced as a result of several recent large surveys (Parker et al., these proceedings). These new discoveries suggest that the `PN phenomenon' is in fact more heterogeneous than…
This paper describes how commercially available spectrographs can be used to identify and measure some basic characteristics of planetary nebulae.
The dynamics of an elliptical galaxy within a couple of effective radii can be probed effectively by stars. However, at larger distances planetary nebulae (PNe) replace stars as the tracer of the dynamics. Making use of the motion of PNe,…
The study of the chemical composition of Planetary Nebulae in external galaxies is of paramount importance in the fields of stellar evolution and of the chemical enrichment history of galaxies. In the last years a number of spectroscopic…