Planetary nebulae of the Large Magellanic Cloud I. A multiwavelength analysis

Abstract

Planetary nebulae (PNe) have three main components: a central star (CS), ionized gas, and dust in the nebula. Each contains critical chemical fingerprints of the PN's evolution, which serve as tracers of the evolution, nucleosynthesis, and dust production that occurred during the preceding asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase. We aim to build a bridge to link the PN phase to the evolution of progenitors, to better understand the dust production and mass-loss mechanism during the final AGB phase. Here we present a comprehensive study of nine Large Magellanic Cloud spherical or elliptical PNe whose observations from the UV through the IR are available in the literature. We characterize nebulae and CSs, finding information necessary to reconstruct the evolutionary history of mass-loss and dust production, such as as the amount of gas that makes up the nebula and the dust that surrounds the CS. We compared the observed energy distribution of the selected PNe to that obtained from photoionization modeling, taking the presence of dust into account. The physical and chemical parameters of the CSs were then compared with predictions from the evolutionary tracks. We characterize the source, assigning a progenitor, early-AGB mass to each CS. We estimate the mass of the nebula and the dust-to-gas ratio. For five objects, we find evidence for the presence of a near-IR bump, which would indicate the presence of hot dust.