Let be the conserved number density of hydrogen nuclei, whether ionized or bound, and the ionization fraction. The ideal gas pressure counts neutral atoms, free protons and free electrons:
At low temperature and . Heating through the ionization region increases the particle count as well as their thermal energy, giving a steeper rise. At high temperature , so and the asymptotic slope is twice the low-temperature slope. There is a smooth ionization crossover, not a pressure discontinuity.
The held graph is legible. Representative readings are and , with readout uncertainties of roughly – and about . They give on the neutral branch and on the ionized branch, respectively. Both are consistent with
The error is a conservative graph-reading estimate, not a fitted experimental confidence interval.
For that density, the Saha equation gives at , at , and at . Differentiating the ionization relation gives
The calculated maximum slope occurs near , consistent with the source's visibly steepest region at roughly . This checks the actual slope rather than identifying it without justification with exactly half ionization.
Taking the neutral ground-state gas as the zero of internal binding energy, the matter energy density is translational kinetic energy plus ionization energy:
At , with , these terms are about and , giving
Rest energies are excluded. A separate equilibrium radiation field, if the gas were in a blackbody cavity, would add its own radiation energy density; it is not part of this gas-only estimate.
Figure 1.
Calculated hydrogen pressure and ionization crossover at two conserved nucleus densities
. Details.
Increasing the conserved nucleus density to multiplies the low-temperature neutral-gas slope and high-temperature ionized-gas slope by ten. However, at a fixed intermediate temperature, is smaller, so a smaller fraction is ionized. The curved transition therefore moves to higher temperature; the new graph is not simply ten times the old graph throughout the crossover.
At a fixed chosen ionization fraction, must increase tenfold. Locally this requires
which is of order in this region. Directly evaluating the same Saha equation at moves the maximum pressure slope from about to . The two asymptotic slopes still have ratio two, because each hydrogen nucleus still contributes one particle when neutral and two when fully ionized.
Write . Then , giving local slope . At 5000–6000 K its magnitude is about K. The low-ionization tail in the original graph drops roughly one decade per K, consistent with this value.
At K, the graph gives K and . Invert the full equation to get , yielding . The neighboring tail markers give the same order; plotting precision and the squared dependence on the read ionization fraction preclude claiming many significant digits.