Astrophysics (Index)About

flux

(flux density)
(flow rate per unit area)

Flux means flow, and is used in astrophysics regarding electromagnetic radiation (EMR) (e.g., the flow of its energy), magnetic fields, fluid dynamics, and other areas.

Flux density (often shortened to flux) is the rate of flow of something through a unit area. However, the term flux is also used to mean the total flow rate from something, e.g., the phrase radiant flux being the total flow of EMR energy to/from/through something (a star's radiant flux would be its luminosity). The term flux is also used regarding CCDs, to refer to the rate of EMR reception by a defined portion of it, such as that received by an individual pixel.

Fluence (aka radiant exposure, in the case of EMR) is a total amount of flow per unit area rather than a rate. For example, the term fluence might be used for the total energy per cm² that a gamma-ray burst (GRB) or fast radio burst (FRB) placed on some finite surface. Flux density might be described as the fluence rate, or fluence-per-second.


(EMR,physics,measure,magnetism)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux
https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/F/Flux
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fluence

Referenced by pages:
AB system
Darcy velocity field
extragalactic background light (EBL)
flux density
flux reconstruction (FR)
flux rope
gauss (G)
Gini/M20
habitability
jansky (Jy)
Lyman break (LB)
Lyman-Werner photon
point-spread function (PSF)
power law
Poynting vector (S)
radiant flux
radiative flux
radio source counts
solar constant
source function (S)
spectral energy distribution (SED)
spectral flux density (S)
spectral index (α)
spectral line shape
spicule
Stardust
Swordy plot
Vega system
watt (W)

Index