Johnson-Cousins Photometric System
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Johnson-Cousins Photometric System
__NOTOC__ The UBV photometric system (from ''Ultraviolet, Blue, Visual''), also called the Johnson system (or Johnson-Morgan system), is a photometric system usually employed for classifying stars according to their colors. It was the first standardized photometric system. The apparent magnitudes of stars in the system are often used to determine the color indices B−V and U−B, the difference between the B and V magnitudes and the U and B magnitudes respectively. The system is defined using a set of color optical filters in combination with an RMA 1P21 photomultiplier tube. The choice of colors on the blue end of the spectrum was assisted by the bias that photographic film has for those colors. It was introduced in the 1950s by American astronomers Harold Lester Johnson and William Wilson Morgan. A telescope and the telescope at McDonald Observatory were used to define the system. The filters that Johnson and Morgan used were Corning 9 863 for U and 3 384 for V. The B ...
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Photometric Systems
Photometry can refer to: * Photometry (optics), the science of measurement of visible light in terms of its perceived brightness to human vision * Photometry (astronomy), the measurement of the flux or intensity of an astronomical object's electromagnetic radiation * A photometric study, sometimes also referred to as a lighting "layout" or "point by point" See also * Photogrammetry * Radiometry Radiometry is a set of techniques for measurement, measuring electromagnetic radiation, including visible light. Radiometric techniques in optics characterize the distribution of the radiation's power (physics), power in space, as opposed to phot ...
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Photometric System
In astronomy, a photometric system is a set of well-defined passbands (or optical filters), with a known sensitivity to incident radiation. The sensitivity usually depends on the optical system, detectors and filters used. For each photometric system a set of primary standard stars is provided. A commonly adopted standardized photometric system is the Johnson-Morgan or UBV photometric system (1953). At present, there are more than 200 photometric systems. Photometric systems are usually characterized according to the widths of their passbands: * broadband (passbands wider than 30 nm, of which the most widely used is Johnson-Morgan UBV system) * intermediate band (passbands between 10 and 30 nm wide) * narrow band (passbands less than 10 nm wide) Photometric letters Each letter designates a section of light of the electromagnetic spectrum; these cover well the consecutive major groups, near-ultraviolet (NUV), visible light (centered on the V band), near-infra ...
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Strömgren Photometric System
The Strömgren photometric system, abbreviated also as ''uvbyβ'' or simply ''uvby'', and sometimes referred as Strömgren - Crawford photometric system, is a four-colour medium-passband photometric system plus Hβ (H-beta) filters for determining magnitudes and obtaining spectral classification of stars. Its use was pioneered by the Danish astronomer Bengt Strömgren in 1956 and was extended by his colleague the American astronomer David L. Crawford in 1958. It is often considered to be a powerful tool and successful investigating the brightness and effective temperature of stars. This photometric system also has a general advantage as it can be used to measure the effects of reddening and interstellar extinction. This system also allows calculation of parameters from the b and y filters (b-y) without the effects of reddening, termed m_1 and c_1. Wavelength and half-width response functions The following table shows the characteristics of each of the filters used (represented ...
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Alan William James Cousins
Alan William James Cousins FRAS (8 August 1903 – 11 May 2001) was a South African astronomer. His career spanned 70 years during which time he concentrated on the measurement of variable stars, including the measurement of the two sinusoidal periods of Gamma Doradus. The UBV photometric system for measuring stellar fluxes he devised in the 1990s became a standard known as the "Cousins system". Education and career He was born in Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town, the eldest of four children, and his father Clarence Wilfred Cousins was a senior civil servant who served for a time as Secretary of Labour. His grandfather on his mother's side was Sir James Murray, first editor of the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', and Cousins attended Murray's funeral at the age of 11. Cousins' interest in Astronomy was aroused first by the sighting of Halley's Comet in 1910 and then by a book on Astronomy ("The Stars" by E.Hawkes) given to him in late 1914 - early 1915 during a family visit to ...
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Main Sequence
In astronomy, the main sequence is a classification of stars which appear on plots of stellar color index, color versus absolute magnitude, brightness as a continuous and distinctive band. Stars on this band are known as main-sequence stars or dwarf stars, and positions of stars on and off the band are believed to indicate their physical properties, as well as their progress through several types of star life-cycles. These are the most numerous true stars in the universe and include the Sun. Color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams after Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell. After condensation and ignition of a star, it generates thermal energy in its dense stellar core, core region through nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. During this stage of the star's lifetime, it is located on the main sequence at a position determined primarily by its mass but also based on its chemical composition and age. The cores of main-sequence stars are in hydros ...
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Stellar Classification
In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their stellar spectrum, spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a Prism (optics), prism or diffraction grating into a spectrum exhibiting the Continuum (spectrum), rainbow of colors interspersed with spectral lines. Each line indicates a particular chemical element or molecule, with the line strength indicating the abundance of that element. The strengths of the different spectral lines vary mainly due to the temperature of the photosphere, although in some cases there are true abundance differences. The ''spectral class'' of a star is a short code primarily summarizing the ionization state, giving an objective measure of the photosphere's temperature. Most stars are currently classified under the Morgan–Keenan (MK) system using the letters ''O'', ''B'', ''A'', ''F'', ''G'', ''K'', and ''M'', a sequence from the hottest (''O'' type) to the cool ...
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Effective Temperature
The effective temperature of a body such as a star or planet is the temperature of a black body that would emit the same total amount of electromagnetic radiation. Effective temperature is often used as an estimate of a body's surface temperature when the body's emissivity curve (as a function of wavelength) is not known. When the star's or planet's net emissivity in the relevant wavelength band is less than unity (less than that of a black body), the actual temperature of the body will be higher than the effective temperature. The net emissivity may be low due to surface or atmospheric properties, such as the greenhouse effect. Star The effective temperature of a star is the temperature of a black body with the same luminosity per ''surface area'' () as the star and is defined according to the Stefan–Boltzmann law . Notice that the total ( bolometric) luminosity of a star is then , where is the stellar radius. The definition of the stellar radius is obviously not ...
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Interstellar Reddening
In astronomy, extinction is the absorption and scattering of electromagnetic radiation by dust and gas between an emitting astronomical object and the observer. Interstellar extinction was first documented as such in 1930 by Robert Julius Trumpler. However, its effects had been noted in 1847 by Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve, and its effect on the colors of stars had been observed by a number of individuals who did not connect it with the general presence of galactic dust. For stars lying near the plane of the Milky Way which are within a few thousand parsecs of the Earth, extinction in the visual band of frequencies (photometric system) is roughly 1.8  magnitudes per kiloparsec. For Earth-bound observers, extinction arises both from the interstellar medium and the Earth's atmosphere; it may also arise from circumstellar dust around an observed object. Strong extinction in Earth's atmosphere of some wavelength regions (such as X-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared) is ...
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A-type Main-sequence Star
An A-type main-sequence star (A) or A dwarf star is a main-sequence (hydrogen burning) star of spectral type A and luminosity class (five). These stars have spectra defined by strong hydrogen Balmer absorption lines. They measure between 1.7 and 2.1 solar masses (), have surface temperatures between 7,600 and 10,000  K, and live for about a quarter of the lifetime of our Sun. Bright and nearby examples are Altair (A7), Sirius A (A1), and Vega (A0). A-type stars do not have convective zones and thus are not expected to harbor magnetic dynamos. As a consequence, because they do not have strong stellar winds, they lack a means to generate X-ray emissions. Spectral standard stars The revised Yerkes Atlas system listed a dense grid of A-type dwarf spectral standard stars, but not all of these have survived to this day as standards. The "anchor points" and "dagger standards" of the MK spectral classification system among the A-type main-sequence dwarf stars, i ...
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Color Index
In astronomy, the color index is a simple numerical expression that determines the color of an object, which in the case of a star gives its temperature. The lower the color index, the more blue (or hotter) the object is. Conversely, the larger the color index, the more red (or cooler) the object is. This is a consequence of the logarithmic magnitude scale, in which brighter objects have smaller (more negative) magnitudes than dimmer ones. For comparison, the whitish Sun has a B−V index of , whereas the bluish Rigel has a B−V of −0.03 (its B magnitude is 0.09 and its V magnitude is 0.12, B−V = −0.03). Traditionally, the color index uses Vega as a zero point. The blue supergiant Theta Muscae has one of the lowest B−V indices at −0.41, while the red giant and carbon star R Leporis has one of the largest, at +5.74. To measure the index, one observes the magnitude of an object successively through two different filters, such as U and B, or B and V, where U is ...
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