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Kirchhoff's laws

(Kirchhoff's three laws of spectroscopy)
(laws regarding the source of spectral lines)

Kirchhoff's laws (Kirchhoff's three laws of spectroscopy) indicate the source of spectral lines.

  1. A hot solid, liquid, or dense gas produces a continuous spectrum.
  2. A hot thin (i.e., low density) gas produces emission lines.
  3. A continuous spectrum passing through a cold thin gas produces absorption lines.

Note that other widely-used physical laws are attributed to physicist Gustav Kirchhoff (such as Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation) and another grouping is known as Kirchhoff's laws of circuits.


(physics,EMR)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Kirchhoff#Kirchhoff.27s_three_laws_of_spectroscopy
http://hosting.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/kirchhoff.htm
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/astro801/content/l3_p6.html

Referenced by pages:
absorption line
emission line
emission-line star
Schuster-Schwarzschild model
thermal emission

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