Recent observations reveal that the central star of the planetary nebula Abell 48 exhibits spectral features similar to massive nitrogen-sequence Wolf–Rayet stars .
This raises a pertinent question , whether it is still a planetary nebula or rather a ring nebula of a massive star .
In this study , we have constructed a three-dimensional photoionization model of Abell 48 , constrained by our new optical integral field spectroscopy .
An analysis of the spatially resolved velocity distributions allowed us to constrain the geometry of Abell 48 .
We used the collisionally excited lines to obtain the nebular physical conditions and ionic abundances of nitrogen , oxygen , neon , sulphur and argon , relative to hydrogen .
We also determined helium temperatures and ionic abundances of helium and carbon from the optical recombination lines .
We obtained a good fit to the observations for most of the emission-line fluxes in our photoionization model .
The ionic abundances deduced from our model are in decent agreement with those derived by the empirical analysis .
However , we notice obvious discrepancies between helium temperatures derived from the model and the empirical analysis , as overestimated by our model .
This could be due to the presence of a small fraction of cold metal-rich structures , which were not included in our model .
It is found that the observed nebular line fluxes were best reproduced by using a hydrogen-deficient expanding model atmosphere as the ionizing source with an effective temperature of T _ { eff } = 70 kK and a stellar luminosity of L _ { \star } = 5500 L _ { \bigodot } , which corresponds to a relatively low-mass progenitor star ( \sim 3 M _ { \bigodot } ) rather than a massive Pop I star .