An analysis of two active regions shows that differently evolving ARs may produce major eruptive flares even when, in addition to the accumulation of significant free magnetic energy budgets, they accumulate large amounts of both left- and right-handed helicity without a strong dominance of one handedness over the other.
Some magnetic features in active regions, related to strong solar flares, are considered as “anomaly” features in a machine learning algorithm. An unsupervised auto-encoder network has been trained to identify such anomalies and is used to predict occurrence of strong flares.
Another white-light flare was captured by HMI off the solar limb, this time with materials seen ejected from the Sun. A fraction of the ejecta was seen falling back to the Sun.
A statistical study of emerging active regions demonstrates that these ARs tend to produce CMEs when they accumulate significant budgets of both magnetic helicity and energy.
Through analyzing a number of active regions, this analysis finds that while flares are guided by the physical properties that scale with AR size, CMEs are guided by mean properties, with little dependence on the amount of shear at the polarity inversion line or the net current.
This analysis shows that a new bipolar emergence, whose positive polarity collided with the pre-existing negative polarity, in AR11283 led to energy and helicity buildup in the form of magnetic flux ropes. Recurrent energy releases caused a few homologous CMEs from this region.
Sunquakes are helioseismic waves excited by solar flares, usually observed in the photosphere. However, some of these events are found to have their counterparts in the chromosphere, as observed in the SDO/AIA UV channels.
An unprecedented observation of a limb flare in HMI’s white-light continuum shows that the white-light intensity at the post-flare loop-top continues to grow for 16 more minutes while UV/EUV intensities decay. Both the WL/UV intensity and the EUV intensities show quasi-periodic pulsations with a period close to 8.0 and 6.8 minutes, respectively.
A statistical study of hundreds of solar flares, with or without CMEs associated with them, indicates the larger the total magnetic flux of the flare-host active region, the less likely the flare is associated with a CME.
Why do some flares cause sunquakes and others do not? A survey of 60 strong flares in Solar Cycle 24 supports a hypothesis that the coupling of downward photospheric oscillations and the impacts from flares may play a role in causing sunquakes.