The missing mass conundrum of post-common-envelope planetary nebulae
Abstract
Most planetary nebulae (PNe) show beautiful, axisymmetric morphologies despite their progenitor stars being essentially spherical. Angular momentum provided by a close binary companion is widely invoked as the main agent that would help eject an axisymmetric nebula, after a brief phase of engulfment of the secondary within the envelope of the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) star, known as a common envelope (CE). The evolution of the AGB would be thus interrupted abruptly, its (still quite) massive envelope fully ejected to form the PN, which should be more massive than a PN coming from the same star were it single. We test this hypothesis by deriving the ionised+molecular masses of a pilot sample of post-CE PNe and comparing them to a regular PNe sample. We find the mass of post-CE PNe to be actually lower, on average, than their regular counterparts, raising some doubts on our understanding of these intriguing objects.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1810.09296,
title = {The missing mass conundrum of post-common-envelope planetary nebulae},
author = {Miguel Santander-García and David Jones and Javier Alcolea and Roger Wesson and Valentín Bujarrabal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.09296},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
4 pages, 1 figure, to appear on the proceedings of the IAU Symposium 343: "Why Galaxies Care About AGB Stars: A Continuing Challenge through Cosmic Time"