High-resolution Observations of a White-light Flare with Goode Solar Telescope
Abstract
Using high resolution data from the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) we studied the fine spatial and temporal structure of an M1.3 white light (WL) flare, which was one of the three homologous solar flares (C6.8, M1.3, and M2.3) observed in a close proximity to the west solar limb. The RHESSI photon spectra for the M1.3 flare showed strongly accelerated electrons with energies above 100 keV. Comparison of HXR photon spectra for the three flares suggests that either thermal energy of order of 1030 ergs and/or high energy electrons (>50 keV) are necessary to produce a WL flare. The strong and compact WL cores were ≈0.15 Mm across with an area of about 1014 cm2 . The observed TiO enhancements are not normally distributed and are structured by the magnetic field of the penumbra. Several of the TiO cores were not co-spatial with the Hα emission, which suggests that the TiO and chromospheric emission did not originate in the same chromospheric volume as some models suggest. We thus conclude that fine temporal and spatial structure of the WL flare was largely defined by the associated magnetic fields, which favors the direct heating models, where the flare energy is directly deposited in the temperature minimum region by the accelerated electrons.
- Publication:
-
2018 Triennial Earth-Sun Summit (TESS)
- Pub Date:
- May 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018tess.conf21702Y