The carbon star mystery: 40 years later Straniero, Oscar Abia Ladrón De Guevara, Carlos Antonio Domínguez Aguilera, María Inmaculada In 1981 Icko Iben Jr published a paper entitled “The carbon star mystery: why do the lowmass ones become such, and where have all the high mass ones gone?”, where he discussed the discrepancy between the theoretical expectation and its observational counterpart about the luminosity function of AGB carbon stars. After more than 40 years, our understanding of this longstanding problem is greatly improved, also thanks to more refined stellar models and a growing amount of observational constraints. In this paper we review the state of the art of these studies and we briefly illustrate the future perspectives. 2023-03-14T13:23:24Z 2023-03-14T13:23:24Z 2023-02-06 journal article Straniero, O., Abia, C. & Domínguez, I. The carbon star mystery: 40 years later. Eur. Phys. J. A 59, 17 (2023). [https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-00926-8] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/80596 10.1140/epja/s10050-023-00926-8 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional Springer