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A body that absorbs all radiation incident on it is called an ideal black body. This package provides functions giving the basic properties of black-body radiation at a specified temperature, and a function for plotting black-body spectral distributions.

Black-body radiation properties.

This loads the package.

In[1]:= <<Miscellaneous`BlackBodyRadiation`

The surface of the sun is about 5000 K. Assuming the sun is a black-body radiator, this gives the wavelength at which its spectrum peaks.

In[2]:= PeakWavelength[5000 Kelvin]


This gives the total power radiated by a black body at a temperature of 5000 K.

In[3]:= TotalPower[5000 Kelvin]


This gives the radiative power in the wavelength interval of 0.1 about the peak wavelength of a black body at a temperature of 5000 K.

In[4]:= MaxPower[5000 Kelvin, 10^-7 Meter]


Plotting black-body profiles.

This gives the spectral distribution of radiation from a black body for three different temperatures.

In[5]:= BlackBodyProfile[4000 Kelvin, 5000 Kelvin, 6000 Kelvin,
PlotRange -> {{0, 2 10^(-6)}, {0, 1.1 10^14}}]


Note that you can use the option PlotStyle -> , , ... with BlackBodyProfile to specify different styles for each profile curve.