This is the first post on the binary planetary nebula (PN) blog. With this portal we invite anybody to contribute to the binary PN problem. Information, unpublished data, anything that can help understand the origin of PN in the context of binarity.
The planetary nebula community has traditionally been a single star community. The known number of binaries in the middle of PNe is very small and this has kept the binary mechanisms for shaping PNe a minority channel. There has been however a small group of people, e.g., Noam Socker and Howard Bond who has advocated a larger importance of binarity in the evolution of PNe. Recently, theory has given a new burst of support to the binary hypothesis for shaping axi-symmetric PNe (>90% of all known PNe): magnetic fields needed to shape PNe cannot be sustained in AGB stars for long enough to shape the mass-loss (Nordhaus et al. 2007). Finding more binaries has become a priority, but the recent efforts of Orsola De Marco and collaborators only demonstrated how large the hurdles are when one tries to detect companions. A collaboration was started in June 2007 called Plan-B for Planetary Nebular Binaries to design new search techniques and to keep the PN population in the wider context of AGB, post-AGB and WD single and binary stars.
The new website, http://www.WIYN.org/planb/ keeps tabs on the project outcomes. It is also the entry point for a private wiki accessible by team members where projects are developed (any interested party can become a member: e-mail orsola@amnh.org). With this announcement we are seeking to engage the binary communities (CVs, WD, etc.), mainly to cross pollinate binary and PN fields with information that could be beneficial to both.
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