AAS Nova featured a highlight article on new study investigating Solar Flare Onsets using MinXSS-3 (DAXSS) Data

AAS Nova, a platform of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) that highlights some of the most interesting recent results published in AAS peer-reviewed journals, featured an article about the study of Solar Flare Onsets using new data from the LASP-built MinXSS-3 instrument (also called DAXSS).

Full article here: https://aasnova.org/2024/09/18/watching-solar-flares-heat-up/

Plain-Language Summary: Solar flares are characterized by sudden bursts of energy, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, originating from the solar atmosphere. Although flares have been studied for decades, there are still open questions pertaining to the physics behind this intense energy release mechanism. In this new study, utilizing high resolution soft X-ray spectra measured by the third generation Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer (MinXSS), also known as the Dual-zone Aperture X-ray Solar Spectrometer (DAXSS), a team of researchers at LASP (Anant Telikicherla, Thomas N. Woods, and Bennet D. Schwab) investigated the earliest part of a solar flare, known as the flare onset. The soft X-ray emissions during the flare onset were analyzed to reveal that the flaring plasma was already at a very high temperature (in the range of 10–15 million Kelvin) even before the flare’s more-intensive impulsive phase. Additionally, using spectroscopy, the relative abundance of different coronal elements (including Mg, Si, S, Ca, and Fe) were analyzed during the flare onset, and it was found that the onset phase exhibits similar properties to the main flare impulsive phase. By analyzing Extreme UltraViolet (EUV) images during the flare onset, two patterns of plasma movement were observed, which are referred to as “one-loop” and “two-loop” onsets. These observations combined indicate that the onset phase can act as a preconditioning effect for flares, and the authors will investigate the possibility of using flare onsets for flare prediction/forecasting in future studies.

Full Paper Citation: “Investigating the Soft X-Ray Spectra of Solar Flare Onsets,” Anant Telikicherla et al 2024 ApJ 966 198. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ad37f6