A Model for the Source of Solar-Flare X-Rays

Strauss, Federico M. and Michael D. Papagiannis, A Model for the Source of Solar-Flare X-Rays, ApJ, 164, 369 (1971) (ADS)

The cartoon

(click on the image for a larger version)

An early use of Sturrock's model, a.k.a. the S in CSHKP, aimed at locating the X-ray sources in solar flares. This was not long after Kane had introduced the "impulsive phase" as a guideline to hard X-ray emission, and Neupert had introduced what is now called the Neupert effect. In fact, this (at the time of writing) seems to have been the first full-fledged cartoon in this genre of 2D reconnection scenarios. Hirayama's more 3-dimensional view did not arrive until 1974. In this era solar physicists were just coming around to the idea of thinking about solar flares in terms of their X-ray signatures (but of course ionospheric physicists had always known about this). The model calculations in the paper only dealt with thermal free-free emission, at temperatures ranging up to almost 60 MK, to explain the OGO-5 hard X-ray observations of a nice contemporaneous flare (SOL1968-06-20T17).

Date: 2006 August 10

Update: 2019 November 29