Bibcode
Santander-García, M.; Jones, D.; Alcolea, J.; Wesson, R.; Bujarrabal, V.
Bibliographical reference
Highlights on Spanish Astrophysics X, Proceedings of the XIII Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society held on July 16-20, 2018, in Salamanca, Spain, ISBN 978-84-09-09331-1. B. Montesinos, A. Asensio Ramos, F. Buitrago, R. Schödel, E. Villaver, S. Pérez-Hoyos, I. Ordóñez-Etxeberria (eds.) p. 392-396
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3
2019
Citations
3
Refereed citations
2
Description
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.