Investigating Expansion and Extinction in the Planetary Nebula NGC 7027 with HST

We report on initial analysis of a set of near-UV-to-near-IR Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 emission-line images of the intensively-studied, young and rapidly evolving planetary nebula (PN) NGC 7027. This comprehensive, panchromatic WFC3 image suite, obtained in Fall 2019 (HST Cycle 27), is one of two “first-of-their-kind” panchromatic HST/WFC3 imaging surveys of PNe (the other targeting NGC 6302; see Kastner et al., this meeting) that were designed to further our understanding of the planetary nebula formation process. NGC 7027 is remarkable for its unusual juxtaposition of circularly symmetric, axisymmetric, and point-symmetric (bipolar) structures. The nebula also retains large masses of molecular gas and dust despite harboring a hot (~ 2×10⁵ K) central star and displaying high excitation states. Preliminary results presented here focus on multi-epoch expansion (proper motion) measurements, exploiting a 25-year baseline that extends to early HST (WFPC2) imaging; the detailed distribution of nebular dust, as obtained from hydrogen recombination line extinction mapping; and multi-band measurement of the extinction to NGC 7027’s luminous central star.