A White-light Flare Powered by Magnetic Reconnection in the Lower Solar Atmosphere

Abstract

White-light flares (WLFs), first observed in 1859, refer to a type of solar flares showing an obvious enhancement of the visible continuum emission. This type of enhancement often occurs in most energetic flares, and is usually interpreted as a consequence of efficient heating in the lower solar atmosphere through non-thermal electrons propagating downward from the energy release site in the corona. However, this coronal-reconnection model has difficulty in explaining the recently discovered small WLFs. Here we report a C2.3 white-light flare, which are associated with several observational phenomena: fast decrease in opposite-polarity photospheric magnetic fluxes, disappearance of two adjacent pores, significant heating of the lower chromosphere, negligible increase of hard X-ray flux, and an associated U-shaped magnetic field configuration. All these suggest that this white-light flare is powered by magnetic reconnection in the lower part of the solar atmosphere rather than by reconnection higher up in the corona.

arXiv comment14 pages,5 figures,accepted for publication by ApJL

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Formation of solar quiescent coronal loops through magnetic reconnection in an emerging active region
• Plausibility of ultraviolet burst generation in the low solar chromosphere
• Statistical analysis of the Si I 6560.58 Å line observed by CHASE
• Toward a fast and consistent approach to model solar magnetic fields in multiple layers
• High-resolution Observations of a C9.3 White-light Flare and Its Impact on the Solar Photosphere
• A new view of the solar interface region from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS)
• Hard X-rays from the deep solar atmosphere. An unusual UV burst with flare properties