3He Abundances in Planetary Nebulae
Abstract
The 3He isotope is important to many fields of astrophysics, including stellar evolution, chemical evolution, and cosmology. The isotope is produced in stars which evolve through the planetary nebula phase. Planetary nebulae are the final evolutionary phase of low- and intermediate-mass stars, where the extensive mass lost by the star on the asymptotic giant branch is ionised by the emerging white dwarf. This ejecta quickly disperses and merges with the surrounding ISM. The abundance of 3He can only be derived from the hyperfine transition of the ionised 3He, which is represented as 3He+, these transition can be observed in the radio at the rest frequency of 8.665 GHz. 3He abundances in PNe can help test models of the chemical evolution of the Galaxy. Many hours have been put into trying to detect this line, using telescopes like Effelsberg a 100m dish from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) 140-foot telescope, the NRAO Very Large Array, the Arecibo antenna, the Green Bank Telescope, and only just recently, the Deep Space Station 63 antenna from the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex.
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