Predicting stellar angular diameters from V, IC, H and K photometry

Abstract

Determining the physical properties of microlensing events depends on having accurate angular sizes of the source star. Using long baseline optical interferometry, we are able to measure the angular sizes of nearby stars with uncertainties ≤2 percent. We present empirically derived relations of angular diameters which are calibrated using both a sample of dwarfs/subgiants and a sample of giant stars. These relations are functions of five colour indices in the visible and near-infrared, and have uncertainties of 1.8-6.5 per cent depending on the colour used. We find that a combined sample of both main-sequence and evolved stars of A-K spectral types is well fitted by a single relation for each colour considered. We find that in the colours considered, metallicity does not play a statistically significant role in predicting stellar size, leading to a means of predicting observed sizes of stars from colour alone.