Heavy element abundances in planetary nebulae: A theorist's perspective

TL;DR

This paper models heavy element production in AGB stars to interpret planetary nebula spectra, revealing how nucleosynthesis varies with stellar mass and metallicity, and highlighting challenges in matching observations.

Contribution

It provides detailed predictions of neutron-capture element abundances from AGB models across a range of masses and metallicities, improving understanding of planetary nebula compositions.

Findings

Solar metallicity models match Type I PNe compositions.

Lower mass models fit Se and Kr enriched PNe.

Some highly enriched PNe are difficult to explain with current models.

Abstract

The determination of heavy element abundances from planetary nebula (PN) spectra provides an exciting opportunity to study the nucleosynthesis occurring in the progenitor asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star. We perform post-processing calculations on AGB models of a large range of mass and metallicity to obtain predictions for the production of neutron-capture elements up to the first s-process peak at strontium. We find that solar metallicity intermediate-mass AGB models provide a reasonable match to the heavy element composition of Type I PNe. Likewise, many of the Se and Kr enriched PNe are well fitted by lower mass models with solar or close-to-solar metallicities. However the most Kr-enriched objects, and the PN with sub-solar Se/O ratios are difficult to explain with AGB nucleosynthesis models. Furthermore, we compute s-process abundance predictions for low-mass AGB models of very low metallicity ([Fe/H] =-2.3) using both scaled solar and an alpha-enhanced initial composition. For these models, O is dredged to the surface, which means that abundance ratios measured relative to this element (e.g., [X/O]) do not provide a reliable measure of initial abundance ratios, or of production within the star owing to internal nucleosynthesis.