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Concept

black body

A dark, irregularly shaped object resembling a black hole or a perfect absorber of radiation, set against a starry night sky, symbolizing an idealized concept in physics.

An idealised object that absorbs all radiation falling on it and re-emits a thermal spectrum determined only by its temperature. No real material is perfectly black, but stars, the inside of a kiln, and cosmic background radiation come remarkably close. The concept lets physicists separate the universal physics of thermal emission from the messier details of any particular material's reflectance and emissivity.

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