Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21110007s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #100.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.912
Mathematics
Logic
Scientific paper
Pre-Planetary Nebulae (PPNs) are key objects for understanding the origin of the remarkable morphological and kinematical differences between the slowly expanding, round circumstellar envelopes of AGB stars and their progeny, the bipolar or multipolar and often point-symmetric shells seen in Planetary Nebulae (PNs). Collimated (and possible episodic) fast outflows, resulting directly or indirectly from the presence of a companion, are now widely believed to be responsible for producing these differences. The PPN known as the Red Rectangle is a Rosetta Stone for testing our understanding of binarity in the evolution of AGB stars to bipolar PNs. Its central star is a known spectroscopic binary with well determined orbital characteristics, a Keplerian disk has been detected in it, and it is the nearest known PPN with a distance of 300-700 pc. The Red Rectangle has been imaged in the past with HST and shows an equatorial edge-on waist separating the bipolar lobes. These lobes are remarkably structured and spatially well defined features dubbed rungs and wineglasses are identified on top of an overall X-shaped morphology. We present here results from 2nd-epoch observations, which in combination with the 1st-epoch imaging, have yielded a direct detection of the proper motions of the sharp nebular structures and the overall expansion rate of this nebula. Thanks to the spatial resolution of HST, we can, for the first time, unambiguously assign a distance-independent age to the main nebular structure (of crucial importance to our understanding PPN evolution), and detect and characterise the outflow motions of a collimated outflow from an evolved binary shaping a bipolar pre-planetary nebula.
Sahai Raghvendra
van Winckel Hans
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