CaltechAUTHORS
Published February 2008 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Spitzer SAGE observations of Large Magellanic Cloud planetary nebulae

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
  • 2. ROR icon University of California, Berkeley
  • 3. ROR icon Brown University
  • 4. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 5. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 6. ROR icon Space Science Institute
  • 7. ROR icon University of Wisconsin–Madison
  • 8. ROR icon University of Virginia
  • 9. ROR icon University of Arizona

Abstract

We present IRAC and MIPS images and photometry of a sample of previously known planetary nebulae (PNe) from the Surveying the Agents of a Galaxy's Evolution (SAGE) survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) performed with the Spitzer Space Telescope. Of the 233 known PNe in the survey field, 185 objects were detected in at least two of the IRAC bands, and 161 detected in the MIPS 24 μm images. Color-color and color-magnitude diagrams are presented using several combinations of IRAC, MIPS, and Two Micron All Sky Survey magnitudes. The location of an individual PN in the color-color diagrams is seen to depend on the relative contributions of the spectral components which include molecular hydrogen, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), infrared forbidden line emission from the ionized gas, warm dust continuum, and emission directly from the central star. The sample of LMC PNe is compared to a number of Galactic PNe and found not to significantly differ in their position in color-color space. We also explore the potential value of IR PNe luminosity functions (LFs) in the LMC. IRAC LFs appear to follow the same functional form as the well-established [O III] LFs although there are several PNe with observed IR magnitudes brighter than the cut-offs in these LFs.

Additional Information

© 2008 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2007 July 13; accepted 2007 October 30; published 2008 January 17. This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under NASA contract 1407. Support for this work was provided by NASA through Contract Number 1256790 issued by JPL/Caltech. Support for the IRAC instrument was provided by NASA through Contract Number 960541 issued by JPL. This work is based in part on the IRAC post-BCD processing software "IRACproc" developed by Mike Schuster, Massimo Marengo, and Brian Patten at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. M.C. thanks NASA for supporting his participation in SAGE through JPL contract number 1275471 with UC Berkeley. This work made use of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) database, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. This research has made use of the VizieR catalogue access tool and the SIMBAD database, CDS, Strasbourg, France.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
14272
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20090520-090837938

Funding

NASA
1256790
NASA
960541
JPL
1275471
NSF

Dates

Created
2009-07-09
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-08
Created from EPrint's last_modified field