A tiny white-light flare
| A Tiny White-Light Flare | |
|---|---|
| Number: | 116 |
| 1st Author: | Hugh Hudson |
| 2nd Author: | |
| Published: | 7 December 2009 |
| Next Nugget: | TBD |
| Previous Nugget: | Dips and Waves |
Introduction
We are accustomed to thinking of white-light flares - those detectable to the (protected) naked eye - as the most spectacularly energetic of all flares. That is how [Carrington] discovered flares in 1859, after all. It is generally true that a flare has to be energetic on the scale of Carrington's original one for naked-eye detection, but with sensitive instrumentation one can readily detect weaker events. This Nugget describes a flare at [GOES] class C6.7 - weak - that produced a clearly detectable signature in the [TRACE] white-light channel, as well as in a UV and an EUV channel. This combination of observations lets us describe the broad-band continuum spectrum, or the [spectral energy distribution] as the astronomers quaintly refer to it.