Mysterious iron X-ray lines grow stranger with high precision measurements
Tuesday, June 9, 2020 - 09:10
in Earth & Climate
Two prominent X-ray emission lines of highly charged iron have puzzled astrophysicists for decades because their measured and calculated brightness ratios always disagree. This hinders good determinations of plasma temperatures and densities. New, careful high-precision measurements, together with top-level calculations, now exclude all hitherto proposed explanations for this discrepancy, and thus deepen the problem.