The Origin and Shaping of Planetary Nebulae: Putting the Binary Hypothesis to the Test

By O. De Marco. 2009

268 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Planetary nebulae (PNs) are circumstellar gas ejected during an intense mass-losing phase in the lives of asymptotic giant branch stars. PNs have a stunning variety of shapes, most of which are not spherically symmetric. The debate over what makes and shapes the circumstellar gas of these evolved, intermediate mass stars has raged for two decades. Today the community is reaching a consensus that single stars cannot trivially manu- facture PNs and impart to them nonspherical shapes and that a binary companion, possibly even a substellar one, might be needed in a majority of cases. This theoretical conjecture has, however, not been tested observationally. In this review we discuss the problem from both the theoretical and observational standpoints, explaining the obstacles that stand in the way of a clean observational test and ways to ameliorate the situation. We also discuss indirect tests of this hypothesis and its implications for stellar and galactic astrophysics.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c16e335c06f73d0577a7319faa8df682e6a4946

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Citations in the corpus

The Hα surface brightness–radius relation: a robust statistical distance indicator for planetary nebulae (2015, background): “…by the equation: log SHα = −3.75(±0.11) log r − 5.73(±0.07) (19) HE PNe typically have either round or elliptical morphologies, sometimes with amorphous filled centres, though some are strongly axisymmetric objects associated with post-common envelope nuclei (De Marco 2009; Corradi et al. 2011).”
Common envelope evolution: where we stand and how we can move forward (2012, background): “(2011) find that this effective value of αCE < 1 (see also Ivanova 2011) can explain the recent findings of De Marco et al. (2011): they also found that the value of αCE they deduce from observations is much smaller than what their numerical simulations”
The Close Binary Fraction of Solar-type Stars Is Strongly Anticorrelated with Metallicity (2018, background): “For example, the enhanced close binary fraction of metal-poor solar-type stars substantially strengthens the conclusion that the shaping of PN morphologies is the result of binary interactions (Moe & De Marco 2006; De Marco 2009; Jones & Boffin 2017).”
EVOLUTION, NUCLEOSYNTHESIS, AND YIELDS OF AGB STARS AT DIFFERENT METALLICITIES. III. INTERMEDIATE-MASS MODELS, REVISED LOW-MASS MODELS, AND THE pH-FRUITY INTERFACE (2015, background): “Moreover, the effects induced by rotation (see above) or the presence of a companion (De Marco 2009) could complicate the physical and chemical behavior of PNe.”
On the α formalism for the common envelope interaction (2010, methodology): “Of all the ∼40 post-CE binary central stars listed by De Marco (2009) only six central stars with non-degenerate secondaries have sufficient information to be useful in the present study.”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “The debate over what generates non-spherical PNe continues (De Marco, 2009; Kwitter et al., 2014).”