Dust in the Wolf-Rayet Nebula M1-67

TL;DR

This study models the dust and gas in the Wolf-Rayet nebula M1-67 using infrared and optical data, revealing dust grain distributions, nebular mass, and mass-loss rates, suggesting an eruptive origin and possible binary evolution.

Contribution

It provides a detailed spectral energy distribution model of M1-67, identifying dust grain populations and estimating mass-loss rates, with implications for stellar evolution scenarios.

Findings

Infrared SED fits include two dust grain populations: small MRN grains and large grains.

Estimated nebular ionized gas mass is approximately 9.2 solar masses.

Mass-loss rate during dust formation is about 6 x 10^{-4} solar masses per year.

Abstract

The Wolf-Rayet nebula M1-67 around WR124 is located above the Galactic plane in a region mostly empty of interstellar medium, which makes it the perfect target to study the mass-loss episodes associated with the late stages of massive star evolution. Archive photometric observations from WISE, Spitzer (MIPS) and Herschel (PACS and SPIRE) are used to construct the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the nebula in the wavelength range of 12-500$\mu$m. The infrared (photometric and spectroscopic) data and nebular optical data from the literature are modeled simultaneously using the spectral synthesis code Cloudy, where the free parameters are the gas density distribution and the dust grain size distribution. The infrared SED can be reproduced by dust grains with two size distributions: a MRN power-law distribution with grain sizes between 0.005 and 0.05$\mu$m and a population of large grains with representative size 0.9$ \mu$m. The latter points towards an eruptive origin for the formation of M1-67. The model predicts a nebular ionized gas mass of $M_\mathrm{ion} = 9.2^{+1.6}_{-1.5}~\mathrm{M}_\odot$ and the estimated mass-loss rate during the dust-formation period is $\dot{M} \approx 6 \times 10^{-4} \mathrm{M}_\odot$yr$^{-1}$. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of single and binary stellar evolution and propose that M1-67 represents the best candidate for a post-common envelope scenario in massive stars.