Formation and X-ray emission from hot bubbles in planetary nebulae – II. Hot bubble X-ray emission

Abstract

We present a study of the X-ray emission from numerical simulations of hot bubbles in planetary nebulae (PNe). High-resolution, two-dimensional, radiation-hydrodynamical simulations of the formation and evolution of hot bubbles in PNe, with and without thermal conduction, are used to calculate the X-ray emission and study its time-dependence and relationship to the changing stellar parameters. Instabilities in the wind-wind interaction zone produce clumps and filaments in the swept-up shell of nebular material. Turbulent mixing and thermal conduction at the corrugated interface can produce quantities of intermediate temperature and density gas between the hot, shocked wind bubble and the swept-up photoionized nebular material, which can emit in soft, diffuse X-rays. We use the CHIANTI software to compute synthetic spectra for the models and calculate their luminosities. We find that models both with conduction and those without can produce the X-ray temperatures and luminosities that are in the ranges reported in observations, although the models including thermal conduction are an order of magnitude more luminous than those without. Our results show that at early times the diffuse X-ray emission should be dominated by the contribution from the hot, shocked stellar wind, whereas at later times the nebular gas will dominate the spectrum. We analyse the effect of sampling on the resultant spectra and conclude that a minimum of 200 counts is required to reliably reproduce the spectral shape. Likewise, heavily smoothed surface-brightness profiles obtained from low-count detections of PNe do not provide a reliable description of the spatial distribution of the X-ray emitting gas.