Errors When Constraining Hot Blackbody Parameters with Optical Photometry

TL;DR

This study quantifies the large errors in estimating hot blackbody parameters using optical photometry alone, highlighting the importance of UV data and prior choice in reducing uncertainties.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes the errors in optical-only blackbody parameter estimation and provides guidelines and data to account for these uncertainties.

Findings

Temperatures above ~35,000K can be misestimated by ~10,000K.

Optical-only fits can underestimate bolometric luminosities by factors of 3-5.

Adding UV data significantly reduces estimation errors.

Abstract

Measuring blackbody parameters for objects hotter than a few 10^4K with optical data alone is common in many astrophysical studies. However this process is prone to large errors because at those temperatures the optical bands are mostly sampling the Rayleigh-Jeans tail of the spectrum. Here we quantify these errors by simulating different blackbodies, sampling them in various bands with realistic measurement errors, and re-fitting them to blackbodies using two different methods and two different priors. We find that when using only optical data, log-uniform priors perform better than uniform priors. Still, measured temperatures of blackbodies above ~35,000K can be wrong by ~10,000K, and only lower limits can be obtained for temperatures of blackbodies hotter than ~50,000K. Bolometric luminosities estimated from optical-only blackbody fits can be wrong by factors of 3-5. When adding space-based ultraviolet data, these errors shrink significantly. For when such data are not available, we provide plots and tables of the distributions of true temperatures that can result in various measured temperatures. It is important to take these distributions into account as systematic uncertainties when fitting hot blackbodies with optical data alone.