The direct relation between the duration of magnetic reconnection and the evolution of GOES light curves in solar flares

Abstract

GOES soft X-ray light curves are used to measure the timing and duration of solar flare emission. The timing and duration of the magnetic reconnection and subsequent energy release which drives solar flares are unknown, though the light curves are presumably related. It is therefore critical to understand the physics which connects the two: how does the time scale of reconnection produce an observed GOES light curve? In this work, we model the formation and expansion of an arcade of loops with a hydrodynamic model, which we then use to synthesize GOES light curves. We calculate the FWHM and the e-folding decay time of the light curves and compare them to the separation of the centroids of the two ribbons which the arcade spans, which is representative of the size scale of the loops. We reproduce a linear relation between the two, as found observationally in previous work. We show that this demonstrates a direct connection between the duration of energy release and the evolution of these light curves. We also show that the cooling processes of individual loops comprising the flare arcade directly affect the measured time scales. From the clear consistency between the observed and modeled linearity, we conclude that the primary factors that control the flare time scales are the duration of reconnection and the loop lengths.

Accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (11)

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Statistical Study of GOES X-ray Quasi-Periodic Pulsations in Solar Flares
• What determines the X-ray intensity and duration of a solar flare?
• Solar Flare Arcade Modelling: Bridging the gap from 1D to 3D Simulations of Optically Thin Radiation
• A statistical Analysis of Magnetic Field Changes in the Photosphere During Solar Flares Using High-cadence Vector Magnetograms and Their Association with Flare Ribbons
• Delayed Development of Cool Plasmas in X-ray Flares from kappa1 Ceti
• Solar Flare Irradiance: Observations and Physical Modeling
• Photospheric Lorentz force changes in eruptive and confined solar flares
• Relationship of peak fluxes of solar radio bursts and X-ray class of solar flares: Application to early great solar flares
• Observational Evidence Linking Loop Length and Thermal-Nonthermal Peak Timing in Solar Flares
• Characterising Solar Magnetic Reconnection in Confined and Eruptive Flares
• Small-Scale and Transient EUV Kernels in Solar Flare Ribbons
• Einstein Probe Discovery of an X-ray Flare from K-type Star PM J23221-0301