Solar Flares as Avalanches in Driven Dissipative Systems

Details Solar Flares as Avalanches in Driven Dissipative Systems Solar Flares as Avalanches in Driven Dissipative Systems

Dec 1992

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992aas...181.5507l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 181st AAS Meeting, #55.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, p.1212

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We further develop the idea that the energy release process in solar flares can be understood as avalanches of many small reconnection events. We consider a generalized model of a vector field with local instabilities that cause rapid diffusion of the field. The distributions of energy release events in this system are in general given by power laws. We make a detailed comparison of the distributions of relaxation events in this system with the distribution of solar flares observed by the ISEE-3/ICE satellite. We find excellent quantitative agreement with the energy, peak luminosity, and duration distributions over four orders of magnitude in flare energy. The elementary reconnection events are found to have energy ~ 10(25) ergs, duration ~ 0.3 s, and typical length scale ~ 400 km. This approach represents a new method of understanding the dynamics of a highly complex magnetized plasma. We will present a video showing how the energy release process proceeds in such a geometry.

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