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Astronomy and Cosmology
Astronomy and Astrophysics
How to interpret this new Keck spectrum picture of Jupiter?
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[QUOTE="Drakkith, post: 6820568, member: 272035"] Indeed. Joseph von Fraunhofer first observed dark lines in the Sun's spectrum around 1814, which was about a decade before photography was invented. 'Proper' spectroscopy began in 1859, when Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen (the inventor of the lab device now called a 'Bunsen Burner') discovered the cause of the dark lines in stellar spectra and then identified 16 elements in the Sun's spectrum over the next few years. Each atom can have potentially a great many spectra lines, as each line corresponds to a transition between two particular electronic states, commonly described as electrons moving between energy levels. Hydrogen has 4 lines in the visible spectrum, but many more outside of that. Here's an image with many of them: [ATTACH type="full" alt="500px-Hydrogen_spectrum.svg.png"]317067[/ATTACH] Note that this is only for a single atom with only a single electron. Atoms with multiple electrons have [I]far[/I] more complicated spectra. Iron itself is known to have around 37,000 spectral lines (Part 7 in [URL='https://www.nist.gov/publications/spectrum-fe-ii']this paper[/URL]), of which about 25,000 have been identified and categorized. Edit: Just a piece of trivia, but did you know that the spectral lines of helium were observed in the Sun's spectrum before helium was ever discovered? The discovery of these lines spurred an investigation from the 1860's to the 1890's when helium was finally isolated in 1895. So, in effect, helium was discovered in the Sun before it was discovered on Earth. Hence its name, helium, after [I]helios,[/I] which is the Greek word for Sun. [/QUOTE]
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How to interpret this new Keck spectrum picture of Jupiter?
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