A Silent Revolution in Fundamental Astrophysics

Abstract

Abstract Arbitrariness in the zeropoint of bolometric corrections is a paradigm that is nearly a century old and leads to two more paradigms. “Bolometric corrections must always be negative,” and “the bolometric magnitude of a star ought to be brighter than its V magnitude”. Both were considered valid before the IAU 2015 General Assembly Resolution B2, a revolutionary document that supersedes all three aforementioned paradigms. The purpose of this article is to initiate new insight into and a new understanding of the fundamental astrophysics and present new capabilities to obtain standard and more accurate stellar luminosities and gain more from accurate observations in the era after Gaia. The accuracy gained will aid in advancing stellar structure and evolution theories and also Galactic and extragalactic research, observational cosmology, and searches for dark matter and dark energy.