From Planetary Nebula nuclei to white dwarfs: The impact of evolutionary envelope masses

Abstract

It is well known that the evolution of white dwarfs (WDs) depends sensitively on the question whether they have “thin” or “thick” envelopes of H and He (see Wood 1995). Standard evolutionary caluclations (e.g. Paczynksi 1971) show that at the tip of the Asymptotic Giant Branch the envelope masses are tightly correlated with the mass of the hydrogen exhausted core (≈ total mass). Accordingly, the masses of hydrogen, MH, and helium, MHe, on top of the degenerate C/O interiors decrease by orders of magnitudes with increasing stellar mass. In contrast, many applications of WD calculations consider only single values of qH,He = log(MH,He/M∗) asuming either “thick” or “thin” envelopes.