Poster abstract details

In our previous work, we have derived accurate chemical abundances of a sample of planetary nebulae (PNe) located near the interface of the galactic bulge and disk. In view of their nature, planetary nebulae have very short lifetimes, and the chemical abundances derived so far have a natural bias favoring younger objects. In this work, we report the results for the physical parameters and abundances for a sample of old PNe located in the galactic bulge, based on low dispersion pectroscopy secured at the SOAR telescope using the Goodman spectrograph. The new data allow us to extend our database including older, weaker objects that are at the faint end of the planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF). The results show that the abundances of our sample are similar to those from other regions of the bulge. Nevertheless, the average abundances of the galactic bulge do not follow the observed trend of the radial abundance gradient in the disk. These results are in agreement with a chemical evolution model for the Galaxy recently developed by our group.