Every self-luminous or reflective source has two independent fingerprints: a light curve (brightness plotted against time) and a color temperature derived from its spectrum via Wien's displacement law, T ≈ b / λpeak. A steady point source with almost no variation and a color temperature near 5,770–6,500 K is consistent with reflected sunlight off a planet like Venus. A brief, sharp brightness spike (seconds-long) with a bluish-white spectrum matches a tumbling satellite panel catching sunlight — a "flare." A slow, smooth fade over minutes with a warm, reddish tail matches re-entering debris or a balloon cooling and drifting from view. Aircraft show a steady baseline with a fast red/white/green blink pattern from anti-collision strobes. This simulator draws a synthetic light curve for the selected reference class, adds sensor noise, extracts a color temperature and peak-to-mean ratio, and cross-correlates the shape against all known reference curves to report the closest match and a confidence score.
T_color ≈ 2.898×10⁶ nm·K / λ_peak(nm)
score(class) = 1 − RMSE(trace, template_class) / RMSE_max
confidence = softmax(score) of best vs runner-up
- Reference profile — the "ground truth" generator used to synthesize the trace; in a real investigation this is unknown and only the resulting curve is available.
- Sensor noise — photometric/atmospheric noise added to the brightness samples; higher noise degrades matching confidence exactly as it would for a real observer.
- Color temperature — read off the source's simulated spectral peak; combined with the light-curve shape it disambiguates sources that otherwise look similar (e.g. a steady warm light vs. a steady hot one).
- Best match / confidence — the archived template whose brightness-vs-time shape correlates best with the live trace, and how much better it fits than the second-best candidate.
Real-world relevance: this is the actual first step professional UAP/UFO analysis teams and astronomers use to triage a reported sighting — comparing brightness dynamics and spectral color against a library of known mundane sources before anything is called genuinely unexplained.