When nature tries to trick us: An eclipsing eccentric close binary superposed on the central star of the planetary nebula M 3-2

Indexación: Scopus.Acknowledgements. Part of this work was done while HMJB was visiting the IAC, thanks to a visitor grant in the framework of a Severo Ochoa excellence programme (SEV-2015-0548). This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2013, 2018), numpy (Van Der Walt et al. 2011), matplotlib (Hunter 2007) and corner (Foreman-Mackey 2016). This research has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) under the grant AYA2017-83383-P. The authors thankfully acknowledge the technical expertise and assistance provided by the Spanish Supercomputing Network (Red Española de Supercomputación), as well as the computer resources used: the LaPalma Supercomputer, located at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. B.M. acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. This work was partially funded by the Spanish MINECO through project AYA2016-78994-P. RW was supported by European Research Grant SNDUST 694520. This work has made use of data from the European Space AgencyBipolar planetary nebulae (PNe) are thought to result from binary star interactions and, indeed, tens of binary central stars of PNe have been found, in particular using photometric time-series that allow for the detection of post-common envelope systems. Using photometry at the NTT in La Silla we have studied the bright object close to the centre of PN M 3-2 and found it to be an eclipsing binary with an orbital period of 1.88 days. However, the components of the binary appear to be two A or F stars, of almost equal mass, and are therefore too cold to be the source of ionisation of the nebula. Using deep images of the central star obtained in good seeing conditions, we confirm a previous result that the central star is more likely much fainter, located 2″ away from the bright star. The eclipsing binary is thus a chance alignment on top of the planetary nebula. We also studied the nebular abundance and confirm it to be a Type I PN. © ESO 2018.https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2018/11/aa33693-18/aa33693-18.htm