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Does the questioner mean, "Why does the helium spectrum have more VISIBLE lines than hydrogen?"?

I am not sure how many lines (within as well as outside the visible spectrum) that there are in the spectrum of each of these elements. I don't think anybody has worked out the spectrum of helium from first principles though they have for hydrogen (find out about the Balmer and Lyman series).

To hazard a guess, I would think that, because helium has two electrons instead of hydrogen's one, there are many more energy levels they can have so the lines relating to each change of energy would be more bunched together, hence the greater the chance of them falling within the visible range.

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10y ago

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