$^3$He Abundances in Planetary Nebulae

TL;DR

This paper discusses the significance of $^3$He abundances in planetary nebulae for understanding stellar and galactic chemical evolution, highlighting observational efforts to detect the hyperfine transition of ionized $^3$He with various radio telescopes.

Contribution

It reviews the importance of $^3$He measurements in planetary nebulae and summarizes recent observational attempts using multiple radio telescopes.

Findings

$^3$He$^+$ hyperfine transition observed at 8.665 GHz.

Detection efforts involve multiple large radio telescopes.

$^3$He$^+$ abundance measurements can test galactic chemical evolution models.

Abstract

The $^3$He isotope is important to many fields of astrophysics, including stellar evolution, chemical evolution, and cosmology. The isotope is produced in stars which evolve through the planetary nebula phase. Planetary nebulae are the final evolutionary phase of low- and intermediate-mass stars, where the extensive mass lost by the star on the asymptotic giant branch is ionised by the emerging white dwarf. This ejecta quickly disperses and merges with the surrounding ISM. The abundance of $^3$He can only be derived from the hyperfine transition of the ionised $^3$He, which is represented as $^3$He$^+$, these transition can be observed in the radio at the rest frequency of 8.665 GHz. $^3$He abundances in PNe can help test models of the chemical evolution of the Galaxy. Many hours have been put into trying to detect this line, using telescopes like Effelsberg a 100m dish from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) 140-foot telescope, the NRAO Very Large Array, the Arecibo antenna, the Green Bank Telescope, and only just recently, the Deep Space Station 63 antenna from the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex.