Most lithium-rich low-mass evolved stars revealed as red clump stars by asteroseismology and spectroscopy

Lithium has confused scientists for decades at almost every scale of the universe. Lithium-rich giants are peculiar stars with lithium abundances greater than model prediction. A large fraction of lithium-rich low-mass evolved stars are traditionally supposed to be red giant branch (RGB) stars. Recent studies, however, report that red clump (RC) stars are more frequent than RGB stars. Here, we present a uniquely large systematic study that combines direct asteroseismic analysis and spectroscopy of the lithium-rich stars. The majority of lithium-rich stars are confirmed to be RCs, whereas RGBs are a minority. We reveal that the distribution of lithium-rich RGBs declines steeply with increasing lithium abundance, with an upper limit of around 2.6 dex, whereas the lithium abundances of RCs extend to much higher values. We also find that the distributions of mass and nitrogen abundance are notably different between RC and RGB stars. These findings indicate that there is still an unknown process that significantly affects surface chemical composition in low-mass stellar evolution. An asteroseismic and spectroscopic analysis of lithium-rich stars improves their classification based on the distributions of lithium, nitrogen and mass, and reveals that most of these evolved stars are red clump rather than red giant branch stars.