IR imaging surveys of AGB stars in the Magellanic Clouds

TL;DR

This paper discusses IR imaging surveys of AGB stars in the Magellanic Clouds, highlighting past limitations, recent advances, and future prospects for understanding galaxy structure and evolution.

Contribution

It reviews the progress in IR surveys and models of AGB stars, emphasizing how new surveys will improve our understanding of galaxy formation.

Findings

Most AGB stars were missed in early surveys due to observational limitations.

Recent surveys have provided a nearly complete view of AGB stars in the Magellanic Clouds.

Future surveys will enhance sensitivity and monitoring, offering new insights into galaxy evolution.

Abstract

AGB stars are ideal IR targets because they are cool and bright. Most of them escaped detection in optical or shallow IR surveys in the eighties contributing to the puzzling missing number of AGB stars with respect to theoretical predictions and former stages of evolution. Observations and AGB models have advanced steadily in the following decades providing us with an almost complete view of the AGB stars in the Magellanic Clouds. Their properties are tracers of structure and chemistry across galaxies. New surveys will be able to fill-in the gaps, in terms of sensitivity and monitoring, providing new constraints for the formation and evolution of the Magellanic Clouds.