Optical and Infrared Colors of Stars Observed by 2MASS and SDSS

Abstract

We discuss optical and infrared photometric properties of stars matched in the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) commissioning data for 50 deg2 of sky. About 98% (63,000) of objects listed in the 2MASS Point Source Catalog in the analyzed area are matched within 2 arcsec to an SDSS source. The matched sources represent 8% of the about 800,000 SDSS sources in this area, and 15% of them are resolved in SDSS imaging data, although they are detected as point sources in 2MASS data. For about 14,000 stars with the smallest photometric errors (< 10%) in both surveys, we present optical and infrared color-magnitude and color-color diagrams. We use optical (SDSS) colors to identify the stellar spectral sequence and show that stars of different spectral types can have similar infrared colors, thus making the classification of stars based on only 2MASS data very difficult. However, a broad separation into ``early'' and ``late'' spectral types (relative to type K0) is possible with a reliability of about 95% even with 2MASS colors alone. The distributions of matched sources in color-magnitude and color-color diagrams are compared to the predictions of a stellar population synthesis code. We find that the models are in fair overall agreement with the data. The most significant discrepancies are found for the number ratio of ``early'' to ``late'' type stars (by about a factor of 2) and in the colors of M stars (up to 0.2 mag).