Don't those freed electrons simply have way too much energy to simply excite orbital electrons around atoms to get them to emit photons? I could never understand how ionizing radiation, nor the resulting freed electrons can simply excite atoms as it only takes a few electron volts (for example: 13.6 eV for say hydrogen) to completely ionize atoms and the *ionizing* radiation that Geiger-Müller counter detects typically has energies in the range of *THOUSANDS* to even *MILLIONS* of electron volts which as you can tell is *WAY* above the ionizing energy of any known element of the periodic table.
@@brfisher1123 to explain that a bit off topic: the Sun, has Emission in the H-Alpha line, which is a line that occurs, when an excited electron falls from the 3rd to the 2nd shell of an H-Atom. But isn't the sun made of plasma? Why should an electron be bound to a nucleus in the first place? Its in the Definition of a plasma, that electrons aren't bound. Explanation: it is rare but we have baquillion of Atoms there and if it happens even in 1/1000000 Events. It will be more than enough Events to detect it. A single Alpha particle can f*** up the electron configuration of several thousand Atoms and it just takes some few electrons transitions to detect a signal. Its a numbers game :D
