Solar Flares: The Gradual Phase

Global Properties of Solar Flares

Solar flares in the recent sunspot maximum

At the time of writing (October, 2005) we have almost completed the fourth solar maximum of the space age, during which we have had nearly continuous study of solar activity from above the Earth’s atmosphere. During the most recent part of this era the progress of technology has enabled new observations with unprecedented scope. As a result we have learned many new and important things about so...

The local Poisson hypothesis for solar flares

The question of whether flares occur as a Poisson process has important consequences for flare physics. Recently Lepreti et al. presented evidence for local departure from Poisson statistics in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) X-ray flare catalog. Here it is argued that this effect arises from a selection effect inherent in the soft X-ray observations; namely that th...

Lithium-6 from Solar Flares

By introducing a hitherto ignored Li producing process, due to accelerated He reactions with He, we show that accelerated particle interactions in solar flares produce much more Li than Li. By normalizing our calculations to gamma-ray data we demonstrate that the Li produced in solar flares, combined with photospheric Li, can account for the recently determined solar wind lithium isotopic ratio...

7Li PRODUCTION IN SOLAR FLARES

The Y ohkoh satellite has registered X-ray spectra of two solar Ñares with a linelike feature in the region 400È500 keV. Analysis shows that this feature can be interpreted as gamma-ray lines from excited 7Li and 7Be produced from a ] a reactions. The 7Li production rate in the solar atmosphere is estimated from these observations. The lower limit on the Ñare-produced 7Li abundance on the Sun i...