Dick Shaw
NOAO
 

"The Quest for Binary Central Stars in LMC Planetary Nebulae, or... Boosting Other People's Data and Getting Away With It"
 

Planetary Nebulae (PNe) have been studied for centuries, and mark the end-points of post-Asymptotic Giant Branch evolution for most stars. Yet in spite of their familiarity and high public profile, there are some fundamental questions about PN formation and morphology that remain unresolved--in spite of a resurgence in interest among theorists and their powerful models. In particular, it turns out to be difficult to explain the large fraction of PNe with highly asymmetric shapes via plausible evolution paths for single stars. Some have suggested that most or all visible PNe are produced in binary systems. The observational support for this view is hard to come by, however: only 20 Galactic PNe (out of ~2500) are known to have binary nuclei, in spite of decades of searching. We will present the results of a new search for binary central stars of PNe in the Large Magellanic Cloud using time-domain data from the SuperMACHO and OGLE-III surveys, as well as the IRSF and SAGE surveys in the infrared. This search has (so far) been conducted solely with data from these independent archival or private surveys, and yet it has arguably already been as productive as the total of all prior Galactic surveys to date. Along the way we have discovered some bizzare kinds of variability.