Accuracy of stellar parameters determined from multicolor photometry

Abstract

The development and application of new methods for intelligent analysis and extraction of information from digital sky surveys carried out in various spectral domains have now become a popular field in astrophysical research and, in particular, in stellar studies. Modern large-scale photometric surveys provide data for 10⁵–10⁶ relatively faint objects, and the lack of spectroscopic data can be compensated by the cross identification of the objects followed by an analysis of all catalogued photometric data. In this paper we investigate the possibility of determining the effective temperature, surface gravity, total extinction, and the total-to-selective extinction ratio based on the photometry provided in the 2MASS, SDSS, and GALEX surveys, and estimate the accuracy of the inferred parameters. We use a library of theoretical spectra to compute the magnitudes of stars in the photometric bands of the above surveys for various sets of input parameters. We compare the differences between the computed magnitudes with the errors of the corresponding surveys. We find that stellar parameters can be computed over a sizable domain of the parameter space. We estimate the accuracy of the resulting parameters. We show that the presence of far-ultraviolet data in the available set of observed magnitudes increases the accuracy of the inferred parameters.