The Araucaria Project. Distances to Nine Galaxies Based on a Statistical\n Analysis of their Carbon Stars (JAGB Method)

Abstract

Our work presents an independent calibration of the J-region Asymptotic Giant\nBranch (JAGB) method using Infrared Survey Facility (IRSF) photometric data and\na custom luminosity function profile to determine JAGB mean magnitudes for nine\ngalaxies. We determine a mean absolute magnitude of carbon stars of\n$M_{LMC}=-6.212 \\pm 0.010$ (stat.) $\\pm 0.030$ (syst.) mag. We then use\nnear-infrared photometry of a number of nearby galaxies, originally obtained by\nour group to determine their distances from Cepheids using the Leavitt law, in\norder to independently determine their distances with the JAGB method. We\ncompare the JAGB distances obtained in this work with the Cepheid distances\nresulting from the same photometry and find very good agreement between the\nresults from the two methods. The mean difference is 0.01 mag with an rms\nscatter of 0.06 mag after taking into account seven out of the eight analyzed\ngalaxies that had their distances determined using Cepheids. The very accurate\ndistance to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) based on detached eclipsing\nbinaries (Graczyk et al. 2020) is also in very good agreement with the distance\nobtained from carbon stars.\n