Reconnection in Flares and CMEs
Abstract
Magnetic reconnection is used nowadays to describe a wide variety of phenomena that occur throughout the universe, from the Earth's magnetosphere, to the Sun, to accretion disks around black holes. However, we need to go back to the late fifties to find the first suggestions about reconnection being at the origin of solar flares. At those times the observational evidence for such an interpretation was real scanty, with respect to the wealth of XUV, radio, and particles data now available. This chapter reviews the observational evidence of reconnection in flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) provided over the years by data mostly acquired by experiments onboard space missions. Starting from the birth of ideas about the nature of the physical processes that might fuel explosive transient events, first attempts will be briefly illustrated together with basic concepts developed by Sweet-Parker and Petschek. On this basis, a list of what we can expect to observe if reconnection is working in transient events will be drawn, and we will show how observations met expectations. The most recent advances will be described and future possibilities will be discussed at the end of the chapter.
- Publication:
-
Advances in Geosciences, Volume 14: Solar Terrestrial (ST)
- Pub Date:
- August 2009
- DOI:
- 10.1142/9789812836205_0005
- Bibcode:
- 2009aogs...14...67P