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Spectroscopic resolution, also referred to as frequency resolution, is simply a measure of a spectrometer's ability to differentiate between two spectral lines with a small difference in frequency. For instance, in order for a spectrometer to resolve two spectral lines separated by 10Hz, it must possess a frequency resolution equal to or below this frequency.
This graph shows the 21 centimeter spectral lines of atomic hydrogen gas from
the center of the Milky Way, using a spectrometer set to a low frequency resolution.
The velocities represented on the horizontal axis can be easily translated into frequencies
by calculating their Doppler shifts.
JPEG Image (30K); Credits
The following is a spectral line graph of the same 21 centimeter lines. The difference is that the spectrometer was set to a much higher spectral resolution.
Notice that each spectral line is more clearly distinguishable from its neighboring lines, and that as a
whole, the shapes of the lines are better defined than in the first graph.
JPEG Image (35K); Credits
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