IAU Colloquium No. 8: Experimental Techniques for the Determination of Fundamental Spectroscopic Data

Extract

The last ten years have brought significant changes to the venerable disciplines of astronomy and spectroscopy. Traditionally astronomers sought wavelength catalogues of identified spectra lines. Under this impetus spectroscopists laboured to provide very accurate wavelength measurements and estimates of emission line intensity. Physicists and astronomers alike are now recognizing interest not only in such properties of isolated atoms as energy levels (or spectral-line wavelengths) and oscillator strengths, but also those atomic properties which depend upon the surroundings of a radiating atom: spectral-line profiles, excitation rates, and level populations. In turn, new uses of lasers and interferometers, fast time resolution, and simple but significantly different absorption and emission samples are altering experimental spectroscopy almost beyond recognition. The present colloquium, chaired by A.H.Cook (University of Edinburgh) and held at Imperial College, London, on September 1-4 1970, aimed to identify the means by which astronomers can now obtain fundamental atomic data.