Astronomy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for astronomers and astrophysicists. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Does Sun's spectrum expose any red shift at all? Namely, the center of it's visible area (not due to limb effect). If it does, how much is it and does it comply with relativity theory or is it higher/lower than theoretically predicted?
I red about it an article dated 1960 (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1960MNRAS.121..421H) and not sure if new studies show different results. Thanks.
Light from the solar photosphere is observed to have a gravitational redshift. The expected value, based on General Relativity is equivalent to a doppler redshift of 633 m/s. It is difficult to measure the exact value because it is obscured and blurred by the turbulent motions in the Sun's atmosphere.
As far as I am aware, the estimated values are entirely consistent with General Relativistic predictions, though the precision is not high enough to make this an especially sensitive test (e.g. $698\pm 113$ m/s Takeda & Ueno 2012).
