The Near-Infrared Tip of the Red Giant Branch. II. An Absolute Calibration in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Understand

We present a new empirical \(JHK\) absolute calibration of the tip of the red giant branch (TRGB) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

• We use published data from the extensive \emph{Near-Infrared Synoptic Survey} containing 3.5 million stars, of which 65,000 are red giants that fall within one magnitude of the TRGB.
• Adopting the TRGB slopes from a companion study of the isolated dwarf galaxy IC\,1613 as well as an LMC distance modulus of \(\mu_0 = \)~18.49~mag from (geometric) detached eclipsing binaries, we derive absolute \(JHK\) zero-points for the near-infrared TRGB.
• For comparison with measurements in the bar alone, we apply the calibrated \(JHK\) TRGB to a 500 deg\textsuperscript{2} area of the 2MASS survey.