emission lines from stars

At the end of Mike Blanton's brown-bag talk at NYU yesterday, Matt Kleban asked: Why don't stars produce emission lines; why only absorption lines? Maryam Modjaz said "because they are hotter on the inside and cooler on the outside". That's true! But it is slightly non-trivial to see why the consequence is always absorption-lines only. And does it mean that if the stars were cold, condensed objects bathed in a hotter radiation field, they would produce emission lines? (I think the answer here might be "yes"; think of a gas cloud bombarded with ionizing radiation.) Also Kleban pointed out that actually the very outside of the Sun is in fact hotter than the surface, which is true, but it must be that this is just so optically thin it barely matters.

In some ways, the biggest paradox about stars is that they aren't all the same temperature: After all, the "surface temperature" of a star is the temperature around the place where the photosphere becomes optically thin; shouldn't this be around 10,000 K for all stars? After all, that's the temperature around which hydrogen atoms recombine (see, for example, the CMB). I don't know any simple answer to this paradoxical question; to my (outsider) perspective it seems like the answer is always all about detailed atomic physics.

many-body systems; composite objects

Every time I teach mechanics (and this is something like the 21st year I have taught it at the undergraduate level) I learn something new. This week we are talking about many-body systems; I had two epiphanies (both trivial, but still): The first is that the description of the object in terms of a center-of-mass vector and then many difference vectors away from the center of mass (one per "atom") is purely a coordinate transform. Indeed, it is just generalized coordinate system that is related to the Newtonian coordinates by a holonomic transformation. Awesome! So when the Lagrangian separates into external and internal terms, this is just a result of the appropriateness of that transformation.

The second is that the definition of the many-body system is completely arbitrary. It should be chosen not on the grounds of being bound or solid or connected but rather on the grounds of whether choosing it that way simplifies the problem solution. Both of these realizations are simple and obvious, but it took a lot of teaching for me to get them fully. I am reminded as I realize these things that the physics concepts we expect first-year undergraduates to manipulate and be comfortable with are in fact pretty damned hard.