The Project

Heating and Cooling in a Solar Flare

Mentors Dr. Dana Longcope and Dr. Angela Des Jardins

An model of energy conservation within a solar flare is of great importance to understanding the mechanics of flaring; large flares are especially interesting in this regard, as their X-ray light curves show enormous heating of the coronal plasma within the flare, sustained much longer than it should be after just one initial burst of energy. This suggests that energy is continually being released for some time after the start of the flare. In most cases the flare is accompanied by a CME, releasing much of the flare's energy and making estimates of the energy distribution very difficult. For this project, we sought a large flare (GOES X-ray class X) that was not accompanied by a CME; of these there were several, but as we desired to use hard X-ray data from the RHESSI spacecraft, which is in low earth orbit and thus misses many solar events during its night, we were limited to just one: an X1.3 flare occuring at 01:43 16 July 2004 out of AR 10649. To facilitate the study, we will be using X-ray light-curves from GOES, hard X-ray data from RHESSI for both imagery and spectroscopy, and imagery from TRACE at 171 Å.