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Register a new userGlobal Energetics of Thirty-Eight Large Solar Eruptive Events
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We have evaluated the energetics of 38 solar eruptive events observed by a variety of spacecraft instruments between February 2002 and December 2006, as accurately as the observations allow. The measured energetic components include: (1) the radiated energy in the GOES 1 - 8 A band; (2) the total energy radiated from the soft X-ray (SXR) emitting plasma; (3) the peak energy in the SXR-emitting plasma; (4) the bolometric radiated energy over the full duration of the event; (5) the energy in flare-accelerated electrons above 20 keV and in flare-accelerated ions above 1 MeV; (6) the kinetic and potential energies of the coronal mass ejection (CME); (7) the energy in solar energetic particles (SEPs) observed in interplanetary space; and (8) the amount of free (nonpotential) magnetic energy estimated to be available in the pertinent active region. Major conclusions include: (1) the energy radiated by the SXR-emitting plasma exceeds, by about half an order of magnitude, the peak energy content of the thermal plasma that produces this radiation; (2) the energy content in flare-accelerated electrons and ions is sufficient to supply the bolometric energy radiated across all wavelengths throughout the event; (3) the energy contents of flare-accelerated electrons and ions are comparable; (4) the energy in SEPs is typically a few percent of the CME kinetic energy (measured in the rest frame of the solar wind); and (5) the available magnetic energy is sufficient to power the CME, the flare-accelerated particles, and the hot thermal plasma.
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Major solar eruptive events (SEEs), consisting of both a large flare and a near simultaneous large fast coronal mass ejection (CME), are the most powerful explosions and also the most powerful and energetic particle accelerators in the solar system, producing solar energetic particles (SEPs) up to tens of GeV for ions and hundreds of MeV for electrons. The intense fluxes of escaping SEPs are a major hazard for humans in space and for spacecraft. Furthermore, the solar plasma ejected at high speed in the fast CME completely restructures the interplanetary medium (IPM) - major SEEs therefore produce the most extreme space weather in geospace, the interplanetary medium, and at other planets. Thus, understanding the flare/CME energy release process(es) and the related particle acceleration processes are major goals in Heliophysics. To make the next major breakthroughs, we propose a new mission concept, SEE 2020, a single spacecraft with a complement of advanced new instruments that focus directly on the coronal energy release and particle acceleration sites, and provide the detailed diagnostics of the magnetic fields, plasmas, mass motions, and energetic particles required to understand the fundamental physical processes involved.
Impulsive solar energetic particle events are widely believed to be due to the prompt escape into the interplanetary medium of flare-accelerated particles produced by solar eruptive events. According to the standard model for such events, however, particles accelerated by the flare reconnection should remain trapped in the flux rope comprising the coronal mass ejection. The particles should reach the Earth only much later, along with the bulk ejecta. To resolve this paradox, we have extended our previous axisymmetric model for the escape of flare-accelerated particles to fully three-dimensional (3D) geometries. We report the results of magnetohydrodynamic simulations of a coronal system that consists of a bipolar active region embedded in a background global dipole field structured by solar wind. Our simulations show that multiple magnetic reconnection episodes occur prior to and during the CME eruption and its interplanetary propagation. In addition to the episodes that build up the flux rope, reconnection between the open field and the CME couples the closed corona to the open interplanetary field. Flare-accelerated particles initially trapped in the CME thereby gain access to the open interplanetary field along a trail blazed by magnetic reconnection. A key difference between these 3D results and our previous calculations is that the interchange reconnection allows accelerated particles to escape from deep within the CME flux-rope. We estimate the spatial extent of the particle-escape channels. The relative timings between flare acceleration and release of the energetic particles through CME/open-field coupling are also determined. All our results compare favourably with observations.
In this study we test 30 variants of 5 physical scaling laws that describe different aspects of solar flares. We express scaling laws in terms of the magnetic potential field energy $E_p$, the mean potential field strength $B_p$, the free energy $E_{free}$, the dissipated magnetic flare energy $E_{diss}$, the mean loop length scale $L$, the mean helically twisted flux tube radius $R$, the sunspot radius $r$, the emission measure-weighted flare temperature $T_w$, the electron density $n_e$, and the total emission measure $EM$, measured from a data set of $lapprox 400$ GOES M- and X-class flare events. The 5 categories of physical scaling laws include (i) a scaling law of the potential-field energy, (ii) a scaling law for helical twisting, (iii) a scaling law for Petschek-type magnetic reconnection, (iv) the Rosner-Tucker-Vaiana scaling law, and (v) the Shibata-Yokoyama scaling law. We test the self-consistency of these theoretical scaling laws with observed parameters by requiring two conditions: a cross-corrleation coefficient of CCC$>$0.5 between the observed and theoretically predicted scaling laws, and a linear regression fit with a slope of $alpha approx 1$. With these two criteria we find that 10 out of the 30 tested scaling law variants are consistent with the observed data, which strongly corroborates the existence and validity of the tested flare scaling laws.
The underlying origin of solar eruptive events (SEEs), ranging from giant coronal mass ejections to small coronal-hole jets, is that the lowest-lying magnetic flux in the Suns corona undergoes the continual buildup of stress and free energy. This magnetic stress has long been observed as the phenomenon of filament channels: strongly sheared magnetic field localized around photospheric polarity inversion lines. However, the mechanism for the stress buildup - the formation of filament channels - is still debated. We present magnetohydrodynamic simulations of a coronal volume that is driven by transient, cellular boundary flows designed to model the processes by which the photosphere drives the corona. The key feature of our simulations is that they accurately preserve magnetic helicity, the topological quantity that is conserved even in the presence of ubiquitous magnetic reconnection. Although small-scale random stress is injected everywhere at the photosphere, driving stochastic reconnection throughout the corona, the net result of the magnetic evolution is a coherent shearing of the lowest-lying field lines. This highly counter-intuitive result - magnetic stress builds up locally rather than spreading out to attain a minimum energy state - explains the formation of filament channels and is the fundamental mechanism underlying SEEs. Furthermore, this mechanism may be relevant to other astrophysical or laboratory plasmas.
Parker (1972) first proposed that coronal heating was the necessary outcome of an energy flux caused by the tangling of coronal magnetic field lines by photospheric flows. In this paper we discuss how this model has been modified by subsequent numerical simulations outlining in particular the substantial differences between the nanoflares introduced by Parker and elementary events, defined here as small-scale spatially and temporally isolated heating events resulting from the continuous formation and dissipation of field-aligned current sheets within a coronal loop. We present numerical simulations of the compressible 3-D MHD equations using the HYPERION code. We use two clustering algorithms to investigate the properties of the simulated elementary events: an IDL implementation of a Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) technique; and our own Physical Distance Clustering (PDC) algorithm. We identify and track elementary heating events in time, both in temperature and in Joule heating space. For every event we characterize properties such as: density, temperature, volume, aspect ratio, length, thickness, duration and energy. The energies of the events are in the range $10^{18}-10^{21}$ ergs, with durations shorter than 100 seconds. A few events last up to 200 seconds and release energies up to $10^{23}$ ergs. While high temperature are typically located at the flux tube apex, the currents extend all the way to the footpoints. Hence a single elementary event cannot at present be detected. The observed emission is due to the superposition of many elementary events distributed randomly in space and time within the loop.
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