IX - The Coefficient of Opacity

Summary

146. Results reached in the present Chapter have been used in anticipation from § 89 onwards. We must therefore return and take up the problem of the absorption coefficient as it presented itself in § 88. At that stage we were occupied with our first astronomical result of importance, viz. that for the series of giant stars from type M to type A the opacity is nearly constant although the internal temperature increases twelvefold between the beginning and end of the series. This suggested (but, as we now see, wrongly) that the opacity might tend to a constant value at high temperatures and so be the same for all stars. Actually, however, the constancy of the opacity was a statistical result applying to groups of stars presumed to be of the same average mass, and there was no test whether the constancy continued for stars of a different mass.

The radiation in the main interior of a star consists of X rays, and comparison is invited with measurements of absorption of X rays made in the laboratory. In § 105 we have found the absorption coefficient at the centre of Capella to be 49 c.g.s. units. This is of the general order of magnitude of the measured coefficients of most elements for hard X rays; for example, it agrees with the coefficient for iron for wave-length about 0·8 Å. It must, however, be noted that the radiation at the centre of Capella is of much greater wave-length, the maximum intensity being at 3·2 Å.