A few years later, Gudzenko, et al. experimented on a plasma undergoing rapid jet-like expansion into a vacuum and found strange spectral lines at weird wavelengths! (Sounds familiar eh!). The faster the plasma cooled the stronger and broader the lines became, often dominating the usual emission lines. They had produced one of the first plasma LASERs. (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation)
Laser action occurs in many other transitions, and in many other ions. Gain is enhanced when the super-hot plasma collides with cold neutral gas or dust, thus increasing the cooling rate. Gain is very sensitive to initial density and temperature, thus by optimizing the initial conditions and ion any desired laser transition can dominate the spectrum.
In technical terms: a plasma laser is produced when a strong population inversion is pumped by three-body recombination in a decaying plasma. An ion in the upper laser state can spontaneously emit a photon which can then stimulate the emission of an identical photon from a nearby ion in the same state. These two photons can later stimulate two more photons etc ... This rapid exponential growth is called amplified spontaneous emission, it is limited by the degree of inversion, the density and the total path length through the active plasma. In any case, emission lines that normally barely show up, all of a sudden become dominant !
This research eventually led to the soft x-ray laser (Matthews et al, 1985), with many uses such as x-ray holograms of tiny structures in molecular biology, fabrication of nano-electronics or diagnostic and initiation of high density fusion plasmas.
All this accumulating research is ignored by the astronomical community. This is very unfortunate since this knowledge taken into an astrophysical context has the potential to solve many enigmas and paradoxes:
For example, Quasars may be ordinary stars within our own galaxy, this conclusion is discussed in the following section