The Jakimiec Track
| Nugget | |
|---|---|
| Number: | 95 |
| 1st Author: | Hugh Hudson |
| 2nd Author: | Fabio Reale |
| Published: | 2 March 2009 |
| Next Nugget: | The Jakimiec Track |
| Previous Nugget: | Coronal Implosion |
Introduction
Astonishingly many tiny flares appear in the RHESSI data (and elsewhere). See the Nugget "A myriad of microflares" for an introduction, and stay tuned to the Nuggets pages for more interesting discoveries about them. The microflares (and the flares) occur in a power law distribution, which means that there is no well-defined average property (this is known "scale invariance"). The solar community (and many others) remain somewhat baffled by the deeper meaning of this fact, which is a bit difficult physically - normally one wants to have a clearly defined phenomenon to theorize about. That is difficult if there is no meaningful average. Another related concept is "stiction", a portmanteau word in the sense of Lewis Carroll. This one could be from "static friction" or maybe "sticking friction," but in any case its analog in the solar corona is Parker's nanoflare concept. The idea of nanoflares is that an apparently steady X-ray emission could just be the result of innumerably many tiny, tiny non-thermal events (the nanoflares) that blend together imperceptibly.