The Morphology of Planetary Nebulae: Simulations with Time-evolving Winds

Details The Morphology of Planetary Nebulae: Simulations with Time-evolving Winds The Morphology of Planetary Nebulae: Simulations with Time-evolving Winds

Apr 1998

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998apj...497..267d&link_type=abstract

Astrophysical Journal v.497, p.267

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

62

Ism: Planetary Nebulae: General, Hydrodynamics, Instabilities

Scientific paper

We have carried out simulations of planetary nebulae (PNs) within the general framework of the interacting stellar winds models, wherein the fast wind from a central star sweeps up the slow wind emitted in a previous epoch. Our two-dimensional simulations take into account the evolution of the velocity and mass-loss rate of the fast wind. This leads to considerably more structure on smaller scales than was seen in those nebulae where the fast wind velocity is held constant. The nebula evolves through an initial momentum-conserving phase before entering the more commonly encountered energy-conserving stage. Both stages are prone to instabilities, which may be the precursor of knots, filaments, and other microstructures that are now commonly seen in Hubble Space Telescope images of PNs. In particular, we note the occurrence of the nonlinear thin shell instability in the early stages, and the formation of Rayleigh-Taylor filaments in the energy-conserving stage. The growth of small-scale structure in the momentum-conserving stage is sensitive to the ratio of the initial wind momenta; the lifetime of the nebula in this stage depends also on the evolution of the wind properties. The overall size scale of the system is determined mainly by the evolution of the fast wind properties. If the evolution is not taken into account when computing kinematic ages, then the ages may be underestimated.

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