Event Details

Solar Flares - The Aurora Solaris? by Prof. Lyndsay Fletcher of Glasgow University

For Teams link, contact n.rogers1@lancaster.ac.uk

Abstract: A solar flare is an intense but short-lived release of energy from the Sun's magnetically dominated atmosphere. Flares accelerate non-thermal particles embodying possibly 50% of the energy released, heat plasma, and radiate across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The central questions in solar flare physics are: how is magnetic energy that was stored in the coronal magnetic field released and converted into other forms, and how is this transported and dissipated in the solar atmosphere giving rise to the flare signatures that we observe? Similar questions are asked about magnetospheric substorms, while flare signatures - and probably the physics behind them - have auroral analogues. However, the synergies are not widely explored or exploited. In this talk, I will overview the basic framework for our understanding of a solar flare before focussing on its development in the solar chromosphere, which is the counterpart of an ionosphere. In recent years, solar physics has benefited from a glut of glorious multi-wavelength images and spectroscopy, and I will show how chromospheric observations are used to constrain important aspects of flare physics. Throughout I will try to highlight the links, as I see them, with substorms and aurorae.