Planetary Nebulae in Gaia EDR3: Central Star identification, properties and binarity

TL;DR

This paper leverages Gaia EDR3 data to accurately identify central stars of planetary nebulae, analyze their properties, and explore binarity, significantly improving previous catalogs and understanding of these stellar objects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive Gaia-based catalog of CSPNe with detailed astrometric, photometric, and binary information, addressing misidentification issues and advancing nebular property analysis.

Findings

Catalog of 2035 PNe with Gaia CSPNe identifications

Distances for 1725 PNe derived from Gaia parallaxes

Detection of wide binary CSPNe and insights into binarity relevance

Abstract

Context. Gaia Early Data Release 3 (EDR3), published in December 2020, features improved photometry and astrometry over that published in the previous DR2 file, and includes a substantially larger number of sources, of the order of 2,000 million, making it a paradigm of Big data Astronomy. Aims. We demonstrate how Gaia data mining can effectively help to solve the issue of central star misidentification, a problem that has plagued the field since its origin. As we did for DR2, our objective is to present a catalogue of CSPNe with astrometric and photometric information in EDR3. Methods. Gaia G(BP)-G(RP) colours allow us to select the sources with sufficient temperatures to ionize the nebula. In order to estimate the real colour of a source, it is important to take into account interstellar extinction and, in the case of compact nebulae, nebular extinction when available. In addition, distances derived from EDR3 parallaxes (combined with consistent literature values) can be used to obtain nebular intrinsic properties from those observed. With this information, CSPNe can be plotted in an HR diagram. Results. We present a catalogue of 2035 PNe with their corresponding CS identification from among Gaia EDR3 sources. We obtain the distances for those with known parallaxes in EDR3 (1725 PNe). In addition, for a subsample (405 PNe) with the most accurate distances, we obtain different nebular properties such as their Galactic distribution, radius, kinematic age and morphology. Furthermore, for a set of 74 CSPNe, we present the evolutionary state (mass and age) derived from their luminosities and effective temperatures from evolutionary models. Finally, we highlight the detection of several wide binary CSPNe through an analysis of the EDR3 astrometric parameters, and we contribute to shedding some light on the relevance of close binarity in CSPNe.