Analytical approximations of K-corrections in optical and near-infrared bands

To compare photometric properties of galaxies at different redshifts, the fluxes need to be corrected for the changes of effective rest-frame wavelengths of filter bandpasses, called K-corrections. Usual approaches to compute them are based on the template fitting of observed spectral energy distributions (SED) and, thus, require multicolour photometry. Here, we demonstrate that, in cases of widely used optical and near-infrared (NIR) filters, K-corrections can be precisely approximated as two-dimensional low-order polynomials of only two parameters: redshift and one observed colour. With this minimalist approach, we present the polynomial fitting functions for K-corrections in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) ugriz, United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) Wide Field Camera YJHK, Johnson-Cousins UBVR_cI_c and Two Micron All Sky Survey JHK_s bands for galaxies at redshifts Z < 0.5 based on empirically computed values obtained by fitting combined optical-NIR SEDs of a set of 10⁵ galaxies constructed from SDSS Data Release 7 (DR7) and UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey DR5 photometry using the Virtual Observatory. For luminous red galaxies we provide K-corrections as functions of their redshifts only. In two filters, g and r, we validate our solutions by computing K-corrections directly from SDSS DR7 spectra. We also present a K-corrections calculator, a web-based service for computing K-corrections online.