BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Extragalactic Astronomy
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fspas.2025.1709047
This article is part of the Research TopicConnecting Planetary Nebulae with Their Host Galaxy Stellar Population PropertiesView all articles
The PICS Project: II. Circumnebular extinction variations and their effect on the planetary nebula luminosity function
Provisionally accepted
Lucas M. Valenzuela1*
George H. Jacoby2Rhea-Silvia Remus1Marcelo M. Miller Bertolami3,4
Roberto H. Mendez5- 1Universitäts-Sternwarte, München, Germany
- 2NOIRLab, Tucson, United States
- 3Instituto de Astrofisica de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina
- 4Universidad Nacional de La Plata Facultad de Ciencias Astronomicas y Geofisicas, La Plata, Argentina
- 5University of Hawai'i at Manoa Institute for Astronomy, Honolulu, United States
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For decades, the theoretical understanding of planetary nebulae (PNe) has remained in tension with the observed universal bright-end cutoff of the PN luminosity function (PNLF). The brightest younger PN populations have been observed to be fainter in their [O III] emission than expected. Recent studies have proposed that circumnebular extinction is a key ingredient in bringing their brightness down to the observed level. In this work we use the recently introduced PICS (PNe In Cosmological Simulations) framework to investigate the impact of different circumnebular extinction treatments on the modeled PNe and their PNLF for a large range of stellar ages and metallicities. We test how different slopes in the observed relation of extinction versus central star mass modify the bright-end cutoffs of the PNLF, finding that steeper slopes lead to large changes for young stellar populations. In contrast, the differences for older PNe are much smaller. However, for individual PNe, the extinctions observed in nearby galaxies appear to be much higher than the models predict, showing that improvements on both the modeling and observational sides are needed to gain a better understanding of the brightest and strongly extincted PNe. These findings further advance the theoretical foundation for interpreting observed extragalactic PN populations coming from more complex composite stellar populations in the future.
Keywords: Planetary Nebulae, Luminosity function, circumnebular dust extinction, modeling, Parameter testing
Received: 19 Sep 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Valenzuela, Jacoby, Remus, Miller Bertolami and Mendez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Lucas M. Valenzuela, lval@usm.lmu.de
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