Observing Planetary and Pre-Planetary Nebulae with the James Webb Space Telescope

Most stars in the Universe that leave the main sequence in a Hubble time will endtheir lives evolving through the Planetary Nebula (PN) evolutionary phase. The heavy mass losswhich occurs during the preceding Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) phase is important acrossastrophysics, dramatically changing the course of stellar evolution, contributing to the dust contentof the interstellar medium, and influencing its chemical composition. The evolution from the AGBphase to the PN phases remains poorly understood, especially the dramatic transformation thatoccurs in the morphology of the mass-ejecta as AGB stars enter the post-AGB phase and their roundcircumstellar envelopes evolve into pre-PNe (PPNe) and then to PNe. The majority of PPNe and PNedeviate strongly from spherical symmetry. Strong binary interactions most likely play a fundamentalrole in influencing this evolutionary phase, but the details of these interactions remain shrouded inmystery. Thus, understanding the formation and evolution of these objects is of wide astrophysicalimportance. PNe have long been known to emit across a very large span of wavelengths, from theradio to X-rays. Extensive use of space-based observatories at X-ray (Chandra/ XMM-Newton),optical (HST) and mid- to far-infrared (Spitzer, Herschel) wavelengths in recent years has producedsignificant new advances in our knowledge of these objects. Given the expected advent of theJames Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the near future, we focus on future high-angular-resolution,high-sensitivity observations at near and mid-IR wavelengths with JWST that can help in addressingthe major unsolved problems in the study of PNe and their progenitors.