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Discovery of Blackbody Stars and the Accuracy of SDSS photometry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2020

Masataka Fukugita
Masataka Fukugita*
Affiliation:
Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa 277-8583 Japan Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ08540, U.S.A.
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Abstract

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We discovered stars that show spectra very close to the blackbody radiation without any line features. We found 17 such stars out of 0.8 million stellar objects in the SDSS archive. The blackbody temperature is approximately 104K. We identify these stars as DB white dwarfs with the helium atmosphere, possibly with a trace amount of hydrogen, that yields nearly perfect blackbody spectrum, which is also confirmed with our later study. These stars can be used to test the accuracy of the AB zero point across different colour bands, in particular including the NIR pass bands. The zero points of SDSS photometry are verified to < 0.01 mag.

Keywords

blackbody starSDSS photometryphotometric calibration

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