Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-radiative-processes-and-high-energy-astrophysics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2024/3/c/solution

Neglect electron mass and nuclear binding corrections when converting mass density into hydrogen and helium number densities. With ,
The thermal free-free emissivity adds over ion species with weights . Consequently
With each Gaunt factor set to one, the mixture has
At fixed , pure hydrogen gives the composition factor , and pure helium gives . The latter check follows independently from and ; simply replacing by an average charge would lose this weighting.

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