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Wien's Displacement Law

OCR A-level PhysicsAstrophysics and CosmologyLesson 11 of 24

Stars behave approximately as black bodies: ideal objects that absorb all the radiation falling on them and emit a continuous spectrum of electromagnetic radiation that depends only on their temperature.

A graph of intensity against wavelength for a black body has a characteristic shape. It rises steeply to a peak at a wavelength λmax, then falls away more gradually at longer wavelengths.

Diagram

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