Planetary nebulae are formed from the ejecta of evolved stars. These ejecta are swept up by the fast low density wind from the hot central star, as it evolves towards a white dwarf. The sweep-up mechanism is called the Interacting Stellar Winds model (Kwok et al. 1978). The history of mass loss is imprinted on the nebular ejecta. The velocity field of the ejecta traces the mass loss event. A continuous mass loss gives a different velocity field from a brief mass loss event. We employed Integral Field Unit spectroscopy to study the velocity fields of three Bulge Planetary Nebulae. The preliminary results show the advantage of continuously sampled IFU spectroscopy over long slit spectroscopy. The kinematic of the nebula NGC 6302 was studied in the plane of the sky by com- parison of two epochs of Hubble Space Telescope images separated by 10 years. A two dimensional velocity field was created from 200 measurements. The nebular lobes are found to follow a Hubble-Flow, and were ejected in a brief event 2250 ± 35 yr ago. The ejection of lobes occurred about 700 yr after the end of AGB mass loss. The distribution of ages revealed that the inner nebula appears to be younger. This effect can be explained with additional acceleration at later stages of nebula evolution. The central star of NGC 6302 is believed to be extremely hot based on observed ionization stages in the spectrum. In this thesis the detection of the NGC 6302 central star is reported. The luminosity of the star was determined to be 4 010 L⊙. Together with age of the nebula age the mass of the star could be considerably narrowed down the mass determination of the star to 0.64 ± 0.01 M⊙.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:553399 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Szyszka, Cezary Tadeusz |
| Contributors | Zijlstra, Albert |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/the-kinematics-of-selected-planetery-nebulae(cf2aa518-fd62-4b9e-8e1c-885edea52ceb).html |
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