While there has been significant progress in our understanding of the origin and evolution of planetary nebulae in the last 50 years, there remain several unsolved problems. These include the true 3D morphological structure of the nebulae, origin of multipolar nebulae, the dust and molecular distribution relative to the optical nebulosity, large-scale structures outside of the main nebulae, the relevance of binarity to planetary nebulae evolution, and a precise definition of the planetary nebula phenomenon. The long-standing problem of elemental abundance discrepancy still remains unsolved. In this paper, we summarize current observations related to these problems and present possible future directions to tackle them.
Kwok et al. (2026) studied this question.