Central-star extinctions towards planetary nebulae

ABSTRACT Planetary nebulae (PNe) trace the hottest and most luminous phase of evolution of solar-type stars. We use these hot, bright stars to investigate extinctions towards a complete sample of 262 confirmed PNe with large angular diameters, which have the most reliable photometry and hottest central stars. For 162 of these PNe, we identify central stars, produce spectral energy distributions from survey data using pyssed, then fit reddened model spectra to the observed photometry to obtain extinctions accurate down to $E(B-V)$ of $\pm 0.02$ mag. The fitting is performed by Nelder–Mead $\chi ^2$ minimization, with uncertainties evaluated through MCMC. The catalogue of stellar temperatures is updated for our sample for the calculation of luminosities. The extinctions agree well with interstellar extinction. We find evidence of circumnebular extinction for one PN, and evaluate its effect on the PNe luminosity function. Four binaries are identified from the spectral energy distributions. The binary fraction in the full sample is between 23 per cent and 36 per cent. We use our compiled data to evaluate the quality of the central star identifications in the literature. Three objects in our sample have previously been classified as post-RGB systems but we find that their parameters may also be consistent with post-AGB evolution.