W. J. Maciel -
Abstract #140
KINEMATIC AGE DETERMINATION OF PLANETARY NEBULA CENTRAL STARS
T. S. Rodrigues, W. J. Maciel
IAU Symposium No. 283, Ed. A. Manchado, L. Stanghellini, D. Schönberner, 486-487
(2012)
Central stars of planetary nebulae (CSPN) have a relatively large mass interval, so that it
is expected that these stars also have different ages, typically above 1 Gyr. Apart from the
properties of the CSPN themselves, the problem of age determination is also important in the
context of the chemical evolution of the Galaxy, for instance in the understanding of the time
variation of chemical abundance gradients. In this work, we estimated the ages of a sample of
CSPN on the basis of some correlations between their kinematic properties and the expected
ages. According to these correlations, the observed dispersions in the U, V, W velocities are
uniquely defined by the stellar ages. The adopted correlations were derived from the recent
Geneva-Copenhagen survey of galactic stars. Preliminary results suggest the most CSPN in the
galactic disk have ages under 3 Gyr. These results are also compared with some recent age
distributions based on independent correlations involving the nebular chemical abundances.
