Stellar Atmospheres

Abstract

The model's restriction to thermal fluxes; the relation between thermal fluxes and atmospheric stateparameters; predicted sizes of thermal matter-flux for observed stars, and its implied unimportance; distribution of state-parameters throughout the atmosphere under the condition of only photon fluxes and linear nonEquiibrium; the same, removing the linearity condition for photon storage and fluxes; resulting physical internal inconsistency of the simple model re linearity; the model when the linearity condition on internal atomic degrees of freedom is removed. A. Kinds of Observed Fluxes to be Expected Under Thermal Models and Their Sizes Obviously, we expect only thermal fluxes; but the questions are their expected size, relative to our observing capability, and upon what this size depends. An upper limit to the flux size is fixed by using the size of the corresponding storage quantity, the fq at some quasi-Equilibrium interior point to compute the flux at the boundary. Consider, for reference, the above-mentioned blackbody cavity whose walls are surrounded by a vacuum. The fluxes from an infinitesimal hole are given by eq. (2.4), where we use Equilibrium distribution functions (cf Vol. 2) for fq (vj) because it is a blackbody cavity: