In: Physics
Consider two stars with effective temperatures Teff = 5800 K and radius 1 RSun , and Teff = 20,000 K and radius 3.5 RSun. Assuming blackbody spectra, what is the ratio of the number of Hydrogen - ionizing photons (hν > 13.6eV) that they produce?
The number density of photons that have energy above Q is
where c1 is a constant.
In the limit
the result simplifies to
The total number is given by the number density multiplied by the volume of the star
In the problem
is the ionization energy of hydrogen
The Boltzmann constant is
Now consider the first star with
This gives
For the second star
This gives
The ratio of these numbers is
or