3D AMR Simulations of Point-Symmetric Nebulae

Abstract

At the end of their lives low mass stars such as our Sun lose most of their mass. The resulting planetary nebulae show a wide variety of shapes, from spherical to highly bipolar. According to the generalized interacting stellar winds model, these shapes are due to an interaction between a very fast tenuous outflow, and a denser environment left over from an earlier slow phase of mass loss. Previous analytical and numerical work shows that this mechanism can explain cylindrically symmetric nebulae very well. However, many circumstellar nebulae have a multipolar or point-symmetric shape. With two-dimensional calculations, Icke showed that these seemingly enigmatic forms can be easily reproduced by a two-wind model in which the confining disk is warped, as is expected to occur in irradiated disks. Here, we present the extension to fully three-dimensional adaptive mesh refinement simulations of such an interaction.