2010/11/01 by Alicia N. Aarnio, Alicia Aarnio, Keivan G. Stassun +4 · 112 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Coronal mass ejection #Flare #Flux (metallurgy) #Galaxy #Halo #Nuclear physics #Physics #Plasma #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Solar flare #Solar wind #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11207-010-9672-7
published in Solar Physics 268(1), 195-212 (Springer Science+Business Media) · 28 pages, 16 figures, accepted to Solar Physics
arxiv created 2010/11/01 · openalex publication_date 2010/12/06 · arxiv updated 2015/05/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/08
In an effort to examine the relationship between flare flux and corresponding CME mass, we temporally and spatially correlate all X-ray flares and CMEs in the LASCO and GOES archives from 1996 to 2006. We cross-reference 6,733 CMEs having well-measured masses against 12,050 X-ray flares having position information as determined from their optical counterparts. For a given flare, we search in time for CMEs which occur 10-80 minutes afterward, and we further require the flare and CME to occur within +/-45 degrees in position angle on the solar disk. There are 826 CME/flare pairs which fit these criteria. Comparing the flare fluxes with CME masses of these paired events, we find CME mass increases with flare flux, following an approximately log-linear, broken relationship: in the limit of lower flare fluxes, log(CME mass)~0.68*log(flare flux), and in the limit of higher flare fluxes, log(CME mass)~0.33*log(flare flux). We show that this broken power-law, and in particular the flatter slope at higher flare fluxes, may be due to an observational bias against CMEs associated with the most energetic flares: halo CMEs. Correcting for this bias yields a single power-law relationship of the form log(CME mass)~0.70*log(flare flux). This function describes the relationship between CME mass and flare flux over at least 3 dex in flare flux, from ~10-7 to 10-4 W m-2.