Dust classification in Galactic PNe

These young PNe provide insight on the effects of dust in early post-asymptotic giant branch evolution, before much of the dust is altered or destroyed by the hardening stellar radiation field. Most of the selected targets have PN-type IRS spectra, while a few turned out to be misclassified stars.

We inspected the group properties of the PN spectra and classified them based on the different dust classes (featureless or F, carbon-rich dust or CRD, oxygen-rich dust or ORD, mixed-chemistry dust or MCD) and subclasses (aromatic and aliphatic, and crystalline and amorphous). All PNe are characterized by dust continuum and more than 80% of the sample shows solid-state features above the continuum, in contrast with the Magellanic Cloud sample where only ~40% of the entire sample displays solid-state features; this is an indication of the strong link between dust properties and metallicity.