L24 Radiation pressure

Week 14, Tuesday

Material covered and references

Today we wil explore the pressure caused by radiation. We will follow the footsteps of Eddington by noting that the pressure of gas + radiation can be expressed as a polytrop if the ratio of Pgas/Ptot is constant.

(From this, it is possible to find an expression for the temperature structure (for a radiative zone, i.e. no convection). When compared with a more detailed MESA model for the Sun, it is not such a bad approximation!)