Planetary nebulae and the chemical evolution of the Magellanic Clouds

TL;DR

This paper presents new chemical abundance measurements of planetary nebulae in the Magellanic Clouds, providing insights into their chemical evolution and nucleosynthesis processes across different metallicities.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive database of planetary nebulae abundances in the Magellanic Clouds and compares them with other Local Group galaxies, advancing understanding of chemical evolution.

Findings

Distance-independent abundance correlations established.

Constraints on nucleosynthesis in progenitor stars derived.

Comparison with Galactic data enhances evolutionary models.

Abstract

The determination of accurate chemical abundances of planetary nebulae (PN) in different galaxies allows us to obtain important constraints of chemical evolution models for these systems. We have a long term program to derive abundances in the galaxies of the Local Group, particularly the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. In this work, we present our new results on these objects and discuss their implications in view of recent abundance determinations the literature. In particular, we obtain distance-independent correlations involving He, N, O, Ne, S, and Ar, and compare the results with data from our own Galaxy and other galaxies in the Local Group. As a result of our observational program, we have a large database of PN in the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds, so that we can obtain reliable constraints to the nucleosynthesis processes in the progenitor stars in galaxies of different metallicities.