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Solar flares occur when magnetic energy builds up within the Sun’s atmosphere and is released as electromagnetic radiation. Lasting anywhere from a number of minutes to a number of hours, flares often reach temperatures around 10 million degrees Kelvin. Due to their intense electromagnetic energy, solar flares may cause disruptions in radio communications, Earth-orbiting satellites and even end in blackouts.
Although flares have been classified based on the quantity of energy they emit at their peak, there has not been significant study into differentiating flares based on the speed of energy build-up since slow-building flares were first discovered within the Eighties. In a brand new paper in Solar Physics, a team, led by UC San Diego astrophysics graduate student Aravind Bharathi Valluvan, has shown that there’s a significant amount of slower-type flares worthy of further investigation.
The width-to-decay ratio of a flare is the time it takes to achieve maximum intensity to the time it takes to dissipate its energy. Mostly, flares spend more time dissipating than rising. In a 5-minute flare, it might take 1 minute to rise and 4 minutes to dissipate for a ratio of 1:4. In slow-building flares, that ratio could also be 1:1, with 2.5 minutes to rise and a pair of.5 minutes to dissipate.
Valluvan was a student on the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) when this work was conducted. Exploiting the increased capabilities of the Chandrayaan-2 solar orbiter, IITB researchers used the primary three years of observed data to catalog nearly 1400 slow-rising flares — a dramatic increase over the roughly 100 that had been previously observed over the past 4 many years.
It was thought that solar flares were just like the snap of a whip — quickly injecting energy before slowly dissipating. Now seeing slow-building flares in such high quantities may change that considering.
“There may be thrilling work to be done here,” stated Valluvan who now works in UC San Diego Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Steven Boggs’ group. “We have identified two several types of flares, but there could also be more. And where do the processes differ? What makes them rise and fall at different rates? That is something we want to know.”
