The Temperature required for Nuclear Reactions in Cosmical Electrical Discharges

Abstract

BELLASCHI and Mason showed in 1937 that the magnetic pinch effect will cause a pressure rise at the axis of an electrical discharge which is proportional to the product of the current and the current density. Both these quantities will decrease outwards beyond some point in the long discharges which I have suggested^1a are, for example, the cause of the emission lines in the spectra of the red or long-period variables and in some extra-galactic nebulæ. There will, therefore, be a pressure gradient along the ‘magnetic tubes’, so to describe them, formed by these discharge channels, and a flow of gas along them. The velocity of this flow will ultimately be the velocity of sound in ionized atomic hydrogen at the gas temperature, which can be derived from the spectrum of the discharge—as can also the gas velocity, from the Doppler shift of the lines. Table 1 shows the agreement between this theory and observation.