Looking at a Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram--which displays the possible life stages of known stars--we can see that there is a path which the majority of stars follow: the Main Sequence. However, some stars, such as Red Giants, Supergiants, and Dwarfs, stray from this line. In addition to those three common branches, a fourth group called Asymptotic Giant-Branch (AGB) stars can be found on an HR diagram. Two of the nearest galaxies to earth, the Small (SMC) and Large (LMC) Magellanic Clouds, provide very valuable information on the life cycle of all types of stars.The LMC and SMC contain a number of stars that fall into the AGB category, which is why our research will focus on infrared images of these two galaxies. There are 6 sets of data available for study, 4 for the LMC and 2 for the SMC. Over the course of 4 years (2005-2007, 2012-2014), the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope has taken infrared images every two to three months. These times, called epochs, can accurately show the change in radiation emission of the hundreds of thousands of stars measured. All the numbers come together in 6 enormous data files (upwards of 100MB each), which provide a table for every epoch of every star. Using our own code and these files, we can identify those stars that fit the minimum epoch requirement of 12 epochs, and calculate the standard deviation of measured light emission for each star. Not only are those numbers important for distinguishing AGB stars from Main Sequence stars, they can also tell us how heat noise disturbed the imaging process. We can normalize the data by measuring the influence of heat noise on constant stars, which would give us very accurate magnitudes for the AGB stars. Finally, we can graph the magnitude vs. time to make a Light Curve, which is valuable in further research of these stars and AGB stars in general. Certain patterns in light emission hint at orbiting planets or the life stage of a star.
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