Dust in the Wolf-Rayet nebula M 1-67

Abstract

The Wolf-Rayet nebula M 1-67 around WR 124 is located above the Galactic plane in a region mostly empty of interstellar medium, which makes it the perfect target to study the mass-loss episodes associated with the late stages of massive star evolution. Archive photometric observations from Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer(WISE), Spitzer (MIPS), and Herschel (PACS and SPIRE) are used to construct the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the nebula in the wavelength range of 12-500 μm. The infrared (photometric and spectroscopic) data and nebular optical data from the literature are modelled simultaneously using the spectral synthesis code cloudy, where the free parameters are the gas density distribution and the dust grain-sized distribution. The infrared SED can be reproduced by dust grains with two size distributions: an MRN power-law distribution with grain sizes between 0.005 and 0.05 μm and a population of large grains with representative size of 0.9 μm. The latter points towards an eruptive origin for the formation of M 1-67. The model predicts a nebular ionized gas mass of Mion = 9.2+1.6-1.5 M⊙ and the estimated mass-loss rate during the dust formation period is \dot{M \approx 6 × 10-4 M⊙ yr-1. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of single and binary stellar evolution and propose that M 1-67 represents the best candidate for a post-common envelope scenario in massive stars.