Breaking the AGB Color Degeneracy with Variability and H 2 O: A Consistent Picture of AGB Chemistry, Dust, and the J-Region Across Environments

arXiv:2609.30551 · astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.SR · Submitted 2026-09-24 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.GA, astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.SR

Submitted: 2026-09-24

Updated: 2026-09-24

Comments: 49 pages, 23 figures, 12 tables, submitted to ApJ, comments welcome

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Metallicity — 75× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Calibration — 23× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Consistency — 9× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Degeneracy — 7× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Abundance — 5× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Large Magellanic Cloud — 4× in this paper
• Robustness — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Self-consistency — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Interpretability — 2× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Long Period Variable — 2× in this paper
• Verification — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Elias — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• European Space Agency — 1× in this paper
• Failure Modes — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• James Webb Space Telescope — 1× in this paper
• Small Magellanic Cloud — 1× in this paper
• Systematic Bias — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transferability — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• The SPHEREx Image and Spectrophotometry Processing Pipeline
• A Sizable Discrepancy in Ground-Based JAGB Distances to Nearby Galaxies
• The morphology of the Magellanic Clouds revealed by stars of different age: results from the DENIS survey
• CHASE Spectral Survey I: Measuring Contamination in the Color-selected J-region Asymptotic Giant Branch Distance Indicator
• SPHEREx 0.75 to 5 mu m Spectra for a Sequence of Nearby Brown Dwarfs
• The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. The OGLE-III Catalog of Variable Stars. IV. Long-Period Variables in the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Mass-loss rates and dust-to-gas ratios for obscured Asymptotic Giant Branch stars of different metallicities

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