Questions tagged [stellar-atmospheres]
Atmospheres of stars and star-like objects. For atmospheres of planets, moons, and other solar system bodies excluding stars, use "planetary-atmosphere" instead.
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What causes the Balmer Jump?
To quote Wikipedia:
Balmer Jump is caused by electrons being completely ionized directly from the second energy level of a hydrogen atom (bound-free absorption), which creates a continuum absorption ...
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Can we use atmospheric retrieval techniques on stars?
Although there are lots of examples of atmospheric retrieval techniques being used on exoplanets, and recently brown dwarfs, I can't find any mention of atmospheric retrieval techniques being used on ...
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Is the gas in a planet forming disk around a star comparable in density to an atmosphere?
If you were standing on a planetesimal in the planet forming disk of a new solar system (or our own, billions of years ago), would you be able to feel "interplanetary wind"? Would it be ...
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At what point does an astronomical body's surface stop being gas giant-like and start being sun-like?
I've generally seen brown dwarfs depicted as more massive and slightly wider Jupiters in varying colors with banded cloud structures, sometimes hot enough to be visible glowing. I've also seen red ...
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Is there molecular hydrogen in the Sun's atmosphere? If so, how much, and how was that first determined and measured?
I don't have a license to practice chemistry, but I'll convert Wikipedia's bond dissociation energy of 435.7 kJ/mol to eV by dividing it by $C / N_A$ where $C$ is 1 Coulomb and $N_A$ is Avogadro's ...
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Wilson effect: How "deep" are sunspots?
I recently learned about the Wilson effect of the Sun's atmosphere. The 2009 Saas Fee Advanced Course 39 states:
Near the solar limb, the umbra [the circular dark region of a sunspot] and the centre-...
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The sun "burns" hydrogen and even has "campfires" on it, but has anyone calculated a rate of actual chemical burning on the Sun?
Answers to Hydrogen burning vs Hydrogen fusing explain that in astrophysics "burning" generally refers to nuclear fusion or at least nuclear reactions1, and information at
Why didn't we ...
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What effect does stellar granulation to have on a chemical analysis of a star's spectrum?
The spectrum from stellar granules will obviously be for hotter gas, while the spectrum from the lanes between them will be for cooler gas.
Does this "average out" so that an average ...
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Help understanding ring diagram analysis used in helioseismology
I need help understanding something. In global helioseismology we study the modes directly (stationary waves characterized by 3 integers numbers: $n$, $l$ and $m$). As the angular degree $l$ becomes ...
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Would the electron cyclotron-maser emission mechanism affect Proxima b's ability to retain an atmosphere?
In a recent arXiv preprint, Pérez-Torres et al. "Monitoring the radio emission of Proxima Centauri" claim the detection of radio emissions synchronised with the orbit of the planet Proxima b....
user24157
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Can lightning occur in stars like the Sun?
In the Wikipedia article about lightining, the following explanation is given about the electrification process in clouds:
The details of the charging process are still being studied by
scientists, ...
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Do brown dwarfs have stripes?
Brown dwarfs (BD) are often depicted with stripes.
brown dwarf Jupiter
Pictures of BD resemble Jupiter but brown dwarfs ...
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Is there any synthetic spectrum software for neutron star?
Is there any software that can calculate the emergent spectrum of a neutron star photosphere, for Teff is about 1e7K, density is above 1e21-1e22 cm^-3 ? Output line wavelength is about 0-100A is ...
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Why are helium resonance lines called "resonance lines"?
Examples of the use of the term:
Formation of the helium extreme-UV resonance lines
On the Formation of the Resonance Lines of Helium in the Sun (unpaywalled)
Formation of the helium EUV resonance ...
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What does this "web on the surface of the Sun" image reflect? What does 789 nm show us?
What is this web on the surface of the Sun? has got me thinking.
This is probably not a normal color photo.
The cooler areas are really dark!
update: Comments point out
The NSO press release says ...
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Is the atmosphere of neutron star solid, liquid or gaseous state? [duplicate]
Neutron star has a thin layer of atmosphere consist mostly of hydrogen and helium and is about less than a metre thick on average, but what wasn't stated in many articles I read is the state of matter ...
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What does the opacity of a molecular transition mean?
In particular, what does it mean when a line (e.g, emission line in stellar wind) is optically thick or thin. I know what an optically think/thick medium is, but how does this concept compare to ...
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At what depth below the Sun's surface does the density reach that of water?
I'd like to write a short supplementary answer to A probe floating in Sun's surface but in order to do so I need to know at roughly what depth relative to the Sun's surface the mass density reaches 1 ...
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What is the density profile within the Sun's photosphere? Which one of these is wrong?
The Sun's photosphere contains the Sun's surface as defined by opacity = 2/3 point. I'd like to see the profile of mass density from bottom to top of the photosphere. I did a quick search and got ...
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Does the Sun's atmosphere have a scale height?
Much of the Earth's atmosphere has a scale height $h$ of roughly 7 to 8 kilometers such that the local density varies as $\exp(-(r-r_0)/h)$ where r is the radius vector and $r_0$ would be some ...
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A neutron star without a flat surface and an atmosphere?
In the Kurzgesagt video Atoms As Big As Mountains — Neutron Stars Explained they state that neutron stars have an atmosphere that reaches about 10 centimeters above the surface.
How is this possible?...
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What was the "optical illusion" that led to erroneous metal concentrations in stellar atmospheres in the galactic center?
Articles summarizing a recent result about certain heavy element concentrations in stars near the galactic center all say that earlier reports about high levels in stellar atmospheres were the product ...
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Why does the adiabatic exponent decrease at the ionization zones?
The context is the ionization zones in stellar atmospheres or interiors, the Sun, for instance.
The adiabatic exponent is the heat capacity ratio:
$$\gamma = \frac{c_P}{c_V} = \frac{C_P}{C_V}$$
And,...
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Does the Sun have any atmosphere?
Does the Sun have any atmosphere of its own? Is it just like the atmospheres that the planets have.
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Why does Gaia use only calcium NIR lines for stellar radial velocity measurements?
I was reading this overview article about the Gaia spacecraft and I saw the following statement:
These spectra provide radial velocity information that are used to study the kinematic and dynamic ...
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How can neutron stars have gaseous atmospheres?
Neutron stars can have small atmospheres. However, they also have extremely strong gravitationally pulls. Shouldn't the all the gas molecules be drawn to the star's surface, and become solids under ...
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What happens to oxygen produced on the Sun (or other stars)?
Through nuclear fusion, the Sun can (or at the very least, someday will) produce atoms of all elements up to and including oxygen. And in terrestrial chemistry at least, when you combine oxygen, ...
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What is the air pressure in the heliosphere (Sun's atmosphere)?
Specifically, I am wondering what the pressure is at a distance of around 1 AU. Does it it decrease quadratically with distance?
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Why do we not find larger quantities of helium in the Sun's atmosphere?
The Sun currently shines because H is being burned to He, and it has been doing this for about 4.57 Ga. But when we analyze the Sun's atmosphere, we do not find unusually large amounts of He. Why not?
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How does one determine the effective temperature of a star from its spectrum?
Determining effective temperature of a star is in general a non-trivial task. Simple reason for this is that we can only study the electromagnetic radiation from a star, but not the temperature ...
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How well can we in principle determine $T_{\textrm{eff}}$ of a star?
This is a question about the basics of astronomy, which I have never happened to see a good discussion for. It is about how well would we be able to measure effective temperature of a star, if we had ...
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