Analytical approximations of K-corrections in optical and near-infrared bands

By I. Chilingarian, A. Melchior, I. Zolotukhin. 2010

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To compare photometric properties of galaxies at different redshifts, the fluxes need to be corrected for the changes of effective rest-frame wavelengths of filter bandpasses, called K-corrections. Usual approaches to compute them are based on the template fitting of observed spectral energy distributions (SED) and, thus, require multicolour photometry. Here, we demonstrate that, in cases of widely used optical and near-infrared (NIR) filters, K-corrections can be precisely approximated as two-dimensional low-order polynomials of only two parameters: redshift and one observed colour. With this minimalist approach, we present the polynomial fitting functions for K-corrections in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) ugriz, United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) Wide Field Camera YJHK, Johnson-Cousins U BV R c I c and Two Micron All Sky Survey J H K s bands for galaxies at redshifts Z < 0.5 based on empirically computed values obtained by fitting combined optical-NIR SEDs of a set of 10 5 galaxies constructed from SDSS Data Release 7 (DR7) and UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey DR5 photometry using the Virtual Observatory. For luminous red galaxies we provide K-corrections as functions of their redshifts only. In two filters, g and r, we validate our solutions by computing K-corrections directly from SDSS DR7 spectra. We also present a K-corrections calculator, a web-based service for computing K-corrections online.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/326349e654b5e1ccd42d1479335e393c644b198e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Early-time light curves of Type Ib/c supernovae from the SDSS-II Supernova Survey (2014, methodology): “We K-corrected the galaxy magnitudes using the g − r color of each galaxy8 (Chilingarian et al. 2010; Chilingarian & Zolotukhin 2012).”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the galaxy colour bimodality (2017, methodology): “We add the correction for Galactic extinction following Schlegel et al. (1998) as well as a k-correction using the method of Chilingarian et al. (2010).”
A universal ultraviolet–optical colour–colour–magnitude relation of galaxies★ (2011, methodology): “Here we provide some details regarding the k-correction computation in GALEX UV bands, while the procedure for optical and NIR filters was exhaustively described earlier (Chilingarian et al. 2010).”