Nearby stars also have larger r-band flux changes when J0923+4236 is faint in a fixed ZTF DR24 test

We test whether slow faint states of the debris-transit candidate ZTF J092311.41+423634.16 have greater flux changes within a night in public ZTF DR24 data. A time-only rule selects one pair per night with a lag of 5 to 120 minutes. The response is a squared change in fixed-reference flux, less the expected quoted noise under independent Gaussian magnitude errors. A fit against the slow flux deficit and log lag gives a positive slope in 126 r-band pairs. Its conditional 95% range is 0.00112 to 0.01380 per unit deficit with 30-day block resampling. The g-band range includes zero. Three of six nearby controls also have positive r-band slope ranges against the target state. A comparison added after these control results uses 103 identical pair nights. The target slope is 0.00590, and the slope of the median control response is 0.00686. The target-minus-control slope is -0.00096, with a 95% range of -0.00537 to 0.00580. This diagnostic does not isolate a target trend. It is not an unbiased estimate of intrinsic target variance. The earlier dense fast observations remain separate evidence for the reported relation. We supply the frozen survey responses, source history, pair data, code, figures, independent arithmetic checks, and an exact fresh-run comparison. The analysis identifies no planet or orbit.

white dwarfs · ZTF DR24 · J0923+4236 · debris transits · control stars · time series · fixed-reference flux · reproducible data