Opacity is a property of many plasmas, and it is normally expected that if an
emission line in a plasma becomes optically thick, its intensity ratio to that
of another transition that remains optically thin should decrease. However,
radiative transfer calculations undertaken both by ourselves and others predict
that under certain conditions the intensity ratio of an optically thick to thin
line can show an increase over the optically thin value, indicating an
enhancement in the former. These conditions include the geometry of the
emitting plasma and its orientation to the observer. A similar effect can take
place between lines of differing optical depth. Previous observational studies
have focused on stellar point sources, and here we investigate the
spatially-resolved solar atmosphere using measurements of the I(1032 A)/I(1038
A) intensity ratio of O VI in several regions obtained with the Solar
Ultraviolet Measurements of Emitted Radiation (SUMER) instrument on board the
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SoHO) satellite. We find several I(1032
A)/I(1038 A) ratios observed on the disk to be significantly larger than the
optically thin value of 2.0, providing the first detection (to our knowledge)
of intensity enhancement in the ratio arising from opacity effects in the solar
atmosphere. Agreement between observation and theory is excellent, and confirms
that the O VI emission originates from a slab-like geometry in the solar
atmosphere, rather than from cylindrical structures.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, ApJ Letters, in pres
