Astrophysics (Index)About

synthetic photometry

(deriving photometry-style data from spectroscopy)

Synthetic photometry is the calculation of photometry information from spectroscopic data, i.e., calculating what the magnitude would be through various passbands/filters, aiming to match observations so as to offer credible determinations of the object's characteristics, accomplished with the efficiency of photometric observation. It can be used to infer information on each star in within a field, but is especially useful to analyze the demographics (age, mass, metallicity) of (potentially distant) groups of stars such as stellar clusters and galaxies, by constructing a mix of stars that would produce the observation photometric data. Libraries of spectroscopic information have been collected to provide source material for the process, e.g., the Lick indices.


(science,astronomy,spectrography,photometry)
Further reading:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1996BaltA...5..459S/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014MNRAS.444..392C/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.475.5023C/abstract

Referenced by page:
synthetic spectrum

Index