Scientists have finally managed to uncover the secret of missing sulfur in planetary nebulae.
Past research has shown that planetary nebulae must contain more sulfur than they actually do. The strange absence of sulfur has led astrophysicists to call this phenomenon the “sulfur anomaly.” But Popular Mechanics writes that a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that the answer to a mystery that scientists have been pondering for several decades is clearly being hidden.
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Planetary nebulae (PN) have nothing to do with planets and are so named because of their generally rounded shape, which gives them a resemblance to planets. PTs are clouds of gas and dust ejected by a dying star in the process of transforming into a white dwarf star. By human standards, such nebulae have existed for a long time – about 10 thousand years. But by cosmic standards, this is a very short period of time compared to the ages of the stars that form planetary nebulae (several billion years).
Important
Although astrophysicists know a lot about what PTs are, their chemical composition still raises many questions. In particular, studies conducted 20 years ago showed that these gas and dust clouds should be filled with a lot of sulfur, but observations showed that there was very little sulfur there.
This extinction of sulfur was difficult to explain because sulfur had to be created in low- and medium-mass stars in the same quantities as oxygen, neon, argon, and chlorine. This led scientists to call this condition the “sulfur anomaly.” For the next two decades, astrophysicists tried to solve this mystery without success.
The authors of the new study used extremely detailed observations of 130 planetary nebulae obtained using the VLT telescope located at the center of our galaxy. These data had minimal background noise, and therefore scientists were able to analyze the spectral properties of PT in detail and solve a long-standing mystery.
Scientists used argon, rather than oxygen, as the main indicator of PT’s metallicity (i.e., the presence of heavy chemical elements). When searching for the missing sulfur, argon turned out to be more suitable.
It turns out that no “sulfur anomalies” exist, and the secret of the disappearance of sulfur lies in the fact that the historical data are of poor quality and do not show normal sulfur emission lines in the PT spectra. So the new study shows that there is no mystery.
Scientists say they have disproved past theories that the “sulfur anomaly” was caused by an underestimation of the higher stages of sulfur ionization in planetary nebulae.
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Source: Focus
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