Spatial and Temporal Relationships Between WL/UV Continuum and hard X-ray Footpoints in Solar Flares

Hard X-rays show the presence of energetic electrons in the impulsive phase of a solar flare. According to standard models, these electrons contain a large fraction of the total flare energy. We show that comparable amounts of energy are present in the compact, rapidly variable WL and UV bright points that constitute white-light flares. This suggests that these structures can be identified with each other, and indeed the image centroids and time variations match well. There are image differences that we believe mainly to be due to the different resolving powers of Hinode and TRACE WL/UV imaging on the one hand, and RHESSI hard X-rays on the other. We therefore also use RHESSI modeling software to simulate hard X-ray images using TRACE and Hinode data as templates to understand this relationship more precisely.