picking up the conversation from
this thread here since i figure the workshop exists for something other than the indulgence of my argumentative spirit.
You are arguing that we should assume that the color (or lack of color) in a star's spectrum has anything to do with what it is made out of, without experimental evidence to back that up.
not at all. practically everything science knows about these features comes from robust experiments carried out here on earth. if there were no stars, scientists would still have discovered absorption lines and everything we know about them now.
We can't even recreate stellar fusion in a lab. It's a hypothesis. How are we supposed to know what colors this hypothetical process produces?
i think you're still fundamentally misunderstanding the process.
again, absorption lines have nothing to do with fusion. absorption lines are only a function of the
composition of the gas. so, imagine you have a cloud of cool hydrogen gas. no fusion happening at all. now you shine a beam of light through the hydrogen. after it passes through the hydrogen, you break it up into a rainbow using a prism. when you look at the rainbow made by the prism, the spectrum of light will be missing certain wavelengths. these missing wavelengths are always the same and depend only on the chemical composition of the gas.