rescuer: cosmological K-corrections for star clusters

ABSTRACT The advent of JWST now allows entire star cluster populations to be imaged in galaxies at cosmologically significant redshifts, bringing with it the need to apply K-corrections to their magnitudes and colour indices. Since the stellar populations within star clusters can be well approximated by a single age and metallicity, their spectral energy distributions are very different from those of galaxies or supernovae, and their K-corrections behave differently. We derive the photometric K-corrections versus redshift for model star clusters that cover a wide range of ages and metallicities, illustrating the results particularly for the broad-band filters on the Hubble Space Telescope/Advanced Camera for Surveys and the JWST/Near-Infrared Camera that are most commonly being used for imaging of populations of star clusters in distant galaxies. In an appendix, we introduce a webtool called rescuer (REdshifted Star ClUstERs) that can generate K-values and their uncertainties for any user-defined combination of cluster properties.