Abstract We use radiation-hydrodynamical simulations to investigate the formation and synthetic X-ray emission of hot bubbles within planetary nebulae (PNe) driven by the powerful winds of H-deficient, Wolf-Rayet(WR)-type stars. Our models, based on mesa stellar evolution tracks for 1–3 M⊙ progenitors, adopt a recent mass-loss rate prescription for WR stars and incorporate the enhanced radiative cooling of their C-rich material, comparing the results against standard H-rich PN models. The enhanced mass-loss in the WR models leads to an accelerated post-AGB evolution and a subsequent delay in hot bubble formation compared to their H-rich counterparts, as suggested by a previous work. By computing synthetic X-ray spectra that account for the mixed H-rich and H-deficient gas phases, we find that models incorporating WR winds exhibit significantly higher X-ray luminosities (LX) than their H-rich counterparts, but the emissivity-weighted plasma temperature of the X-ray-emitting gas converge to values of TX = 1 − 3 × 106 K, regardless of whether the system follows a WR-type or an H-rich post-AGB evolutionary path. Our results reinforce previous suggestions that mixing is a key mechanism in generating the observed soft X-ray emission even for PN hosting WR central stars.
Orozco-Duarte et al. (Sat,) studied this question.