Ionized Neon in the Photosphere
That thin green line on the horizon is no 'fantasy'. It's the end of your "the photosphere is opaque so you can't see through it" claim.
You keep talking about some "thin green line", but I have gone back several pages and can find no reference to whatever image you think you are talking about. So, what green line on what image?
I understand what sol did, and *IF* those conditions were applicable he'd be correct. Those conditions however are 'strawman' conditions and do not apply to this specific (or any EU oriented) solar model in any way. It also fails to jive with the SERTS spectral data. The neon glows in many ion wavelengths, and less brightly at the lowest end of energy the spectrum. Details matter folks.
Details do matter, but you should get the details right yourself first. look up the
ionization potential for Neon. In order to reach Ne II (that's Ne +1 or singly ionized Neon) you have to provide the electron you want to knock off the atom with at least 21.564 eV of energy. Now suppose you want every single Neon atom to be, at a minimum, once ionized. You have to have that much energy in the plasma per Neon atom. What does that mean physically? Fortunately,
ben m already told us several pages ago ...
You're violating thermodynamics again.
A) Start with a 6000K near-neutral plasma. It has an equipartition energy of about 0.5 eV per electron.
B) Put enough current through it to ionize every atom. That's > 20 eV per electron, or 2 megajoules per mole (!!). After ~one mean free path this energy gets virialized---shared between ionization potentials, kinetic energy, excitations, etc.
C) Now you don't have a 6000K plasma, you have a 240,000K plasma.
Is the photosphere a 240,000K plasma? No. Therefore there is not now and has never been a large ionized neon fraction.
That 240,000 Kelvins comes from dividing the energy per electron (~20 eV) by Boltzmann's constant in the appropriate units (8.61729x10
-5 eV/Kelvin).
If the Neon atoms are ionized by photons, you need a photon bath of
no less than 240,000 K to do the job. Furthermore, if you want to maintain the plasma in that state, then you have to maintain the photon bath at that temperature. Of course, we would easily see those photons if they were there; we don't see them, so we know they are not there. Furthermore, there must be a source of energy to maintain that sea of photons. What might be the source of this energy?
If the Neon atoms are being ionized by collision with electrons in the alleged electric current (this seems to be Mozina's favored hypothesis), then the electrons have to carry no less than the very same ~20 eV in kinetic energy, which means the electron temperature of the plasma must be the same 240,000 K. But once an electron collides with a Neon atom and ionizes it, the energy is gone, the free electron quickly recombines with the ion and we are back to neutral Neon. So, once again, if you want to maintain the plasma in that state you have to maintain the current energy and electron temperature as well. Now you have a host of problems. To begin with, copious bremsstrahlung from all those electrons should be seen coming from the photosphere, yet it is not. We should also see copious line emission from the recombining atoms, and we don't see that either (Mozina claims we do but has been unable to make the claim stick). And what drives the current? An electric field? The solar plasma is not a wire, it does not confine the current to flow in the direction a wire would. if we are to believe that the photosphere must
everywhere meet this criterion of ionization, then we must have such currents flowing
everywhere. Do they flow in every direction? What manner of electric field would push electrons in literally
every direction, as opposed to the direction of the field? In what direction does the electric field point? Is it toroidal around the solar equator? Does it run from pole to pole? What mechanism generates an electric field of whatever particular geometry we are supposed to have? And finally, we face yet the same problem the photons faced: Where does all that energy come from?
And do note that all of this comes from a consideration of maintaining a plasma of Ne II (Ne +1 or singly ionized Neon). But Mozina thinks the plasma should be at least Ne V (Ne +4). In order to get that kind of ionization we need at least 97.11 eV per electron, or 1,140,000 Kelvins of temperature to do the job. All of the same problems remain in place, but now we have rather larger numbers and more energy to worry about. The energy of a 171A photon is (
hc/wavelength) 72.6 eV (unless I am in error) and so falls short of the mark. So I would assume that a plasma dominated by Ne IV (Ne +3) or any higher ionization state cannot be maintained in that state by photons of that energy, and might not be opaque to that wavelength, since its energy is insufficient to ionize the neutral Neon too that extent (one should do a more formal calculation along the lines of Sol Invictus before being definitive about opacity; the free electrons could easily be opaque to those photons).
While this leaves the door open for opacity of a Ne III (Ne +2) plasma, one still has to explain physically what is happening, and of course we already see from the discussion above that this will raise problems. Mozina likes to postulate things, assume things, and even demand that nature bow to his well, but he does fall far short of the mark when it comes to meaningful physical explanations for his singular ideas. Most importantly, the principle of
conservation of energy should not be so lightly abandoned. Nobody with half a brain, at least in the context of understanding physics, is going to buy the outrageous notion that all or most of the photospheric Neon is ionized until we have a reliable & reasonable source of energy to get the job done, and an explanation for all the missing but necessary consequences of same.
!
!): It is thermodynamically impossible since it must be at a temperature of at least 9400 K (as measured within the photosphere) and so be a plasma. This has been pointed out to MM many times over the years. Here are some of the explanations given to him that he continues to not be able to understand:
