Re: Whence Degeneracy Pressure?

["John S. Denker" <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

Chuck Britton wrote:
...
> Astronomers speak of 'pressure broadening' of spectral lines.

Sure.  So do lots of other people.

> Low pressure sodium lamps have a MUCH cleaner spectrum than do the
> High Pressure variety.

Yes.

> Isn't this 'pressure broadening' evidence of the Pauli Condition?

I assume "Pauli Condition" means the exclusion principle.

Well, you don't need pressure broadening to have evidence
of that!  Even without broadening, the atomic spectrum as
we know it depends on the e.p.  Indeed the very existence
of sodium atoms depends on the e.p.

> If so, What container do stellar gasses interact with.

That question is out of context.  My earlier remarks had
to do with the container for an _ideal_ gas.  In a 100%
ideal gas with no particle-particle scattering, there
wouldn't be any broadening.

Broadening has to do with atoms (or whatever) being perturbed
when the smack into each other.  That's fine, but it's
not relevant in the context of the previous question, which
asked about particles that didn't interact except via pure
identical-particle effects.

But to answer the present question, in any reasonably dense
gas you can say that each parcel of gas is "contained"
by the neighboring parcels, over reasonably-short time
scales, if you want to view it that way.