Blackbody Stars

Abstract

We report the discovery of stars that show spectra very close to blackbody radiation. We found 17 such stars out of 798,593 stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic data archives. We discuss the value of these stars for the calibration of photometry, regardless of the the physical nature of these stars. This gives us a chance to examine the accuracy of the zero point of SDSS photometry across various passbands: we conclude that the zero point of SDSS photometric system is internally consistent across its five passbands to the level below 0.01 mag. We may also examine the consistency of the zero points between UV photometry of Galaxy Evolution Explorer and SDSS, and IR photometry of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer against SDSS. These stars can be used not only as photometric but also spetrophotometric standard stars. We suggest that these stars showing the featureless blackbody-like spectrum of the effective temperature of 10000 ± 1500 K are consistent with DB white dwarfs with temperatures too low to develop helium absorption features.