Teff and Fbol from Infrared Flux Method

Despite much work and the high internal precision usually achieved, systematic differences of order 100K (or more) among various scales are still present. We present an investigation based on the Infrared Flux Method aimed at assessing the source of such discrepancies and pin down their origin.

We break the impasse among different scales by using a large set of solar twins, stars which are spectroscopically and photometrically identical to the Sun, to set the absolute zero point of the effective temperature scale to within few degrees. Our newly calibrated, accurate and precise temperature scale applies to dwarfs and subgiants, from super-solar metallicities to the most metal-poor stars currently known. At solar metallicities our results validate spectroscopic effective temperature scales, whereas for [Fe/H]<-2.5 our temperatures are roughly 100 K hotter than those determined from model fits to the Balmer lines and 200 K hotter than those obtained from the excitation equilibrium of Fe lines.