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Temprature of a black body

Description

Black-body radiation is the thermal electromagnetic radiation within or surrounding a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment, or emitted by a black body (an opaque and non-reflective body). It has a specific spectrum and intensity that depends only on the body’s temperature, which is assumed for the sake of calculations and theory to be uniform and constant.

The total power (energy/second) the Sun is emitting is given by the Stefan–Boltzmann law.

The Sun emits that power equally in all directions. Because of this, the planet is hit with only a tiny fraction of it. The power from the Sun that strikes the planet (at the top of the atmosphere) is given by this equation.

Because of its high temperature, the Sun emits to a large extent in the ultraviolet and visible (UV-Vis) frequency range. In this frequency range, the planet reflects a fraction α of this energy where α is the albedo or reflectance of the planet in the UV-Vis range. In other words, the planet absorbs a fraction 1 − α of the Sun’s light, and reflects the rest.
a
The relativistic Doppler effect causes a shift in the frequency f of light originating from a source that is moving in relation to the observer, so that the wave is observed to have frequency f’ ,where v is the velocity of the source in the observer’s rest frame, θ is the angle between the velocity vector and the observer-source direction measured in the reference frame of the source, and c is the speed of light. This can be simplified for the special cases of objects moving directly towards (θ = π) or away (θ = 0) from the observer, and for speeds much less than c.

Through Planck’s law the temperature spectrum of a black body is proportionally related to the frequency of light and one may substitute the temperature (T) for the frequency in this equation.

For the case of a source moving directly towards or away from the observer, this reduces to the temperature as given.

Here v > 0 indicates a receding source, and v < 0 indicates an approaching source.

This is an important effect in astronomy, where the velocities of stars and galaxies can reach significant fractions of c. An example is found in the cosmic microwave background radiation, which exhibits a dipole anisotropy from the Earth’s motion relative to this black-body radiation field.

Related formulas

Variables

T ' Temperature of black body (K)
TlTemperature of light source (K)
cSpeed of light
vvelocity of the source in the observer's rest frame (m/s)