Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Jul 1940
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1940natur.146...24k&link_type=abstract
Nature, Volume 146, Issue 3688, pp. 24-25 (1940).
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
6
Scientific paper
THE peculiar difficulty pointed out by Eddington regarding the ultimate fate of a white dwarf star led Fowler1 to make the first application of Fermi-Dirac statistics to astrophysics in a fundamental paper which initiated a long series of investigations, particularly by Milne2, in recent years. The starting point is the expression which represents (neglecting the effect of relativistic mechanics) the number of wave functions corresponding to eigen-values lying in the energy-range ɛ to ɛ + dt for a free electron confined in a field-free region of volume V; this is assumed to hold for the stellar interiors though gravitational and electrical fields are present. For degenerate matter equation (1) leads to the well-known expression for the pressure which reduces the equation for mechanical equilibrium for a star to Emden's equation of index 3/2 giving the relation (``Emden-solution'') between the radius R and the mass M of a white dwarf. Lo is a length characteristic of the white dwarf theory where solar is the solar mass, m the mass of the electron, mH the mass of the proton, G the gravitational constant, and ω°3/2 = 132.4 is a number denning the Emden-solution of index 3/2. µ is the mean molecular weight per free electron, µ = 1 for ionized hydrogen and µ = A/Z ≠ 2 for any other completely ionized element of atomic weight A and atomic number Z. (The material in the interior of a white dwarf star is completely ionized due to pressure ionization.)
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