Synthetic Stellar Photometry – II. Testing the bolometric flux scale and tables of bolometric corrections for the Hipparcos/Tycho, Pan-STARRS1, SkyMapper, and JWST systems

Abstract

We use MARCS model atmosphere fluxes to compute synthetic colours, bolometric corrections and reddening coefficients for the Hipparcos/Tycho, Pan-STARRS1, SkyMapper and JWST systems. Tables and interpolation subroutines are provided to transform isochrones from the theoretical to various observational planes, to derive bolometric corrections, synthetic colours and colour-temperature relations at nearly any given point of the HR diagram for 2600 K < Teff < 8000 K, and different values of reddening in 85 photometric filters. We use absolute spectrophotometry from the CALSPEC library to show that bolometric fluxes can be recovered to ~2 percent from bolometric corrections in a single band, when input stellar parameters are well known for FG dwarfs at various metallicities. This sole source of uncertainty impacts interferometric effective temperatures to ~0.5 percent (or 30 K at the solar temperature). Uncertainties are halved when combining bolometric corrections in more bands, and limited by the fundamental uncertainty of the current absolute flux scale at 1 percent. Stars in the RAVE DR5 catalogue are used to validate the quality of our MARCS synthetic photometry in selected filters across the optical and infrared range. This investigation shows that extant MARCS synthetic fluxes are able to reproduce the main features observed in stellar populations across the Galactic disc.