Past exam of the short options paper shared by Prelims and Parts A and B of the physics course of the University of Oxford / 2018 / S26 / 2 / a / Solution

Opacity is the extinction cross section per unit mass for radiation; a frequency-dependent value ${\kappa }_{\nu }$ gives $d{I}_{\nu }/ds=-{\kappa }_{\nu }\rho I_{\nu }$ when emission is considered separately. Stellar radiative diffusion generally uses an appropriately weighted Rosseland mean opacity. The associated local mean free path is of order $1/(\kappa \rho )$.

At sufficiently high temperature the material is highly ionized, and scattering by free electrons is often dominant for ordinary stellar densities and photon energies well below the electron rest energy. Bound-bound and bound-free absorption weaken as bound electrons disappear; free-free absorption can still matter depending on temperature and density. Thus “high temperature” does not fix the dominant opacity at every possible density. The next part explicitly imposes a Kramers absorption law as a separate scaling model.