A study of carbon-rich post-AGB stars in the Milky Way to understand the production of carbonaceous dust from evolved stars

Context. Knowledge of the Gaia, DR3 parallaxes of Galactic post-asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars makes it possible to exploit these objects as tracers of AGB evolution, nucleosynthesis, and dust production as well as to use them to shed new light on still poorly known physical processes experienced by AGB stars. Aims. The goal of this study is to reconstruct the evolution and the dust formation processes during the final AGB phases of a sample of carbon-rich, post-AGB Galactic stars, with particular attention to the determination of the past mass-loss history. Methods. We study the IR excess of Galactic sources classified as post-AGB single stars by means of dust formation modelling where dust grains form and grow in a static wind and expand from the surface of the star. The method is applied to various evolutionary stages of the final AGB phase of stars with different masses and metallicities. The results from a spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting are used to infer information on mass loss, efficiency of dust formation, and wind dynamics. Results. The detailed analysis of the SED of the sources investigated, which included the derivation of the luminosities and the dust properties, allows us to confirm previous results, mostly based on the surface chemical composition, that most of the investigated sources descend from low-mass (M < M-circle dot) progenitors that reached the C-star stage. Metal-poor carbon stars are characterised by higher IR excesses with respect to their more metal-rich counterparts of similar luminosity due to a higher surface carbon-to-oxygen excess. This work confirms previous conclusions based on a limited sample of carbon-rich post-AGB objects in the Magellanic Clouds, namely that more luminous stars descending from higher-mass progenitors are generally more opaque due to shorter evolutionary timescales that place the dust shell closer to the central object. Through the study of the dynamics of the outflow and results from stellar evolution modelling, we find that the mass-loss rate at the tip of the AGB phase of metal-rich low-mass carbon stars is approximately 1-1.5 x 10(-5) M-circle dot yr(-1), whereas in the metal-poor domain (M) over dot similar to 4 - 5 x 10(-5) M-circle dot yr(-1) is required. These results indicate the need for an upwards revision of the theoretical mass-loss rates of low-mass carbon stars in the available literature, which in turn require a revised determination of carbon dust yields by AGB stars.