Global Forces in Eruptive Solar Flares: The Lorentz Force Acting on the Solar Atmosphere and the Solar Interior

The paper in which this cartoon appears deals with the interesting interaction between the corona and the solar interior during a solar flare. In some cases an appreciable fraction of the flare energy actually winds up inside the Sun, despite the unfavorable kinematics. There must be some physically interesting mechanism to complete this link, and at the time of this paper the identity of this link had not really been narrowed down beyond half a dozen possibilities. The cartoon describes one of them: the simple backwarming of the photosphere as the result of UV illumination from a powerful flare in the chromosphere.

      It is not clear why the authors describe this illumination as b-f (bound-free), when obviously it would be f-b (free-bound) instead.