41 ms·

Is there a lower bound on albedo caused by black body radiation? If so, what is it?

• ghkbrew 12y ago
  I think that sort of depends on how you define your terms. Generally albedo is how much of the light which hits an object is reflected. A perfect black body, by definition doesn't reflect any light: all of it is absorbed and converted into thermal energy. It does however emit light with a frequency spectrum dependent on its temperature. So if you wanted to, you could calculate a pseudo-albedo as incident light over emitted light for various conditions, but it wouldn't be an intrinsic property of your material like albedo is usually considered