The Origin of the Solar Flare Waiting-Time Distribution

Abstract

It was recently pointed out that the distribution of times between solar flares (the flare waiting-time distribution) follows a power law, for long waiting times. Based on 25 years of soft X-ray flares observed by Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) instruments it is shown that 1. the waiting-time distribution of flares is consistent with a time-dependent Poisson process, and 2. the fraction of time the Sun spends with different flaring rates approximately follows an exponential distribution. The second result is a new phenomenological law for flares. It is shown analytically how the observed power-law behavior of the waiting times originates in the exponential distribution of flaring rates. These results are argued to be consistent with a non-stationary avalanche model for flares.

7 pages, 3 figures, accepted by ApJ Letters

Cited by in corpus (72)

• 25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Solar and Astrophysics
• Stellar Activity on the Young Suns of Orion: COUP Observations of K5-7 Pre-Main Sequence Stars
• The Interaction of Successive Coronal Mass Ejections: A Review
• Avalanche dynamics of radio pulsar glitches
• From Radio to X-ray: Flares on the dMe Flare Star EV Lacertae
• Microflares and the Statistics of X-ray Flares
• The MUSCLES Treasury Survey. V. FUV Flares on Active and Inactive M Dwarfs
• A Comparison of Flare Forecasting Methods. II. Benchmarks, Metrics and Performance Results for Operational Solar Flare Forecasting Systems
• Inter-occurrence Times in the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld Sandpile Model: A Comparison with the Turbulent Statistics of Solar Flares
• Intensity Thresholds and the Statistics of the Temporal Occurrence of Solar Flares
• Flare Heating in Stellar Coronae
• Point process model of 1/f noise versus a sum of Lorentzians
• Solar Flares as Cascades of Reconnecting Magnetic Loops
• Reconciliation of Waiting Time Statistics of Solar Flares Observed in Hard X-Rays
• Automated detection of small-scale magnetic flux ropes in the solar wind: First results from the Wind spacecraft measurements
• Repeating fast radio bursts with WSRT/Apertif
• Diffusion entropy and waiting time statistics of hard x-ray solar flares
• The effect of thresholding on temporal avalanche statistics
• From Solar and Stellar Flares to Coronal Heating: Theory and Observations of How Magnetic Reconnection Regulates Coronal Conditions
• The coronal mass ejection waiting-time distribution
• Statistical Modeling of Solar Flare Activity from Empirical Time Series of Soft X-ray Solar Emission
• Superfluid vortex unpinning as a coherent noise process, and the scale invariance of pulsar glitches
• The Power-Law Distribution of Flare Kernels and Fractal Current Sheets in a Solar Flare
• 25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Numerical Detection Methods
• A common stochastic process rules gamma-ray burst prompt emission and X-ray flares
• Fast radio bursts trigger aftershocks resembling earthquakes, but not solar flares
• The Unpredictability of the Most Energetic Solar Events
• Predictive Capabilities of Avalanche Models for Solar Flares
• Reliable Probability Forecast of Solar Flares: Deep Flare Net-Reliable (DeFN-R)
• Predicting Solar Flares by Data Assimilation in Avalanche Models. I. Model Design and Validation
• A simplified numerical model of coronal energy dissipation based on reduced MHD
• Evidence for departure from a power-law flare size distribution for a small solar active region
• On the Brightness and Waiting-time Distributions of a Type III Radio Storm observed by STEREO/WAVES
• Quiescent times in Gamma-Ray-Bursts: hints of a dormant inner engine
• Waiting Times of Quasi-homologous Coronal Mass Ejections from Super Active Regions
• Nature of grand minima and maxima from fully non-linear Flux-Transport Dynamos
• Deterministically Driven Avalanche Models of Solar Flares
• Principle of Minimum Energy in Magnetic Reconnection in a Self-Organized Critical Model for Solar Flares
• Flares, Rotation, Activity Cycles and a Magnetic Star-Planet Interaction Hypothesis for the Far Ultraviolet Emission of GJ 436
• Modelling the influence of photospheric turbulence on solar flare statistics
• The Poissonian Origin of Power Laws in Solar Flare Waiting Time Distributions
• Waiting time distribution of solar energetic particle events modeled with a non-stationary Poisson process
• The Solar Memory From Hours to Decades
• Spatiotemporal organization of energy release events in the quiet solar corona
• On the Relation of Hard X-ray Peak Flux and Outburst Waiting Time in the Black Hole Transient GX 339-4
• Time-evolving distribution of time lags between commercial airline disasters
• Statistical study of spatio-temporal distribution of precursor solar flares associated with major flares
• Statistical characterisation of full-disk EUV/XUV solar irradiance and correlation with solar activity
• Correlation of the sunspot number and the waiting time distribution of solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and solar wind switchback events observed with the Parker Solar Probe
• Giant micropulse emission in the Vela pulsar at C band
• A Correlation in the Waiting-time Distributions of Solar Flares
• Observed Rate Variation in Superflaring G-type Stars
• Statistical Models for Solar Flare Interval Distribution in Individual Active Regions
• DIAmante TESS AutoRegressive Planet Search (DTARPS): I. Analysis of 0.9 Million Light Curves
• Scaling and Universality in the Temporal Occurrence of Repeating FRBs
• Flaring together: A preferred angular separation between sympathetic flares on the Sun
• Are Triggering Rates of Labquakes Universal? Inferring Triggering Rates From Incomplete Information
• Solar Flare Occurrence Rate and Waiting Time Statistics
• Non-Stationary Fast-Driven Self-Organized Criticality in Solar Flares
• Statistical properties of the Bipolar Magnetic Regions
• Self-organized critical characteristics of teraelectronvolt photons from GRB 221009A
• What can we infer about the underlying physics from burst distributions observed in an RMHD simulation ?
• Statistical Study of Short Quiescent Times Between Flares
• Role of the Solar Minimum in the Waiting Time Distribution Throughout the Heliosphere
• Time-dependent Stochastic Modeling of Solar Active Region Energy
• Gamma-ray burst engines may have no memory
• Statistical relationship between the succeeding solar flares detected by the RHESSI satellite
• Estimates of Densities and Filling Factors from a Cooling Time Analysis of Solar Microflares Observed with RHESSI
• A statistical search for a uniform trigger threshold in solar flares from individual active regions
• A short-ranged memory model with preferential growth
• Waiting times between gamma-ray flares of Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars, and constraints on emission processes
• Forecasting Solar Flares by Data Assimilation in Sandpile Models