Katharine K. Reeves 1, Terry G. Forbes 2, Jon Linker 3 & Zoran Mikić 3 1 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 2 University of New Hampshire 3 Science Applications International Corporation Theoretical Predictions of Energy Release in CMEs and Calculations of Flare Emissions Thanks to the NSF-SHINE program for funding this work!
Overview Main Goal: Energy dissipated in the current sheet Flare emissions Methods: 1. Analytic: loss-of- equilibrium model 2. Numerical: 2.5D MHD code (SAIC MAS) Lin & Forbes, 2000
Equilibrium Curve Forbes & Priest, 1995
Poynting Flux Thermalized
Energy Release
Effect of M A on Energy Time (s) Energy (x ergs) M A = M A = M A = 0.1 Reeves & Forbes, ApJ, 2005
Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) Light Curves Observed Simulated Data from Reeves & Warren, ApJ, 2002 Simulated light curves from Reeves & Forbes, ApJ 2005
Velocities and Light Curves Red curves Blue curves Background Field: 50 G Flux rope mass: 2.1 x gm Background Field: 25 G Flux rope mass: 4.0 x gm
Densities in the flare loops Density Reeves, Warren & Forbes, ApJ, 2007
Simulated Flare Images TRACE 171ÅTRACE 195Å SXT Al12SXT Be119 Reeves, et al., ApJ, 2007
Loop-top knots and bars (e.g. Feldman, et al., 1995) Yohkoh SXTTRACE 171TRACE 195 (e.g. Doschek & Warren, 2005)
SAIC MAS MHD model
Density Temperature
Energy over simulation domain shearing flux cancellation current sheet forms
Current sheet
Energy partition
Energy into current sheet
Energy flow at r0
Energy flow at r1
Simulated light curves
XRT observations
Conclusions The loss-of-equilibrium model is capable of simulating flare emissions characteristic of observations In the SAIC simulations, a higher fraction of the energy leaves the current sheet at the r1 boundary than the r0 boundary.
Conclusions Conduction, viscous flow decrease the energy swept in to the current sheet via the Poynting flux. The bulk of the energy flow at r0 is conductive flux, which can be used as the input to multi-threaded 1D flare loop simulations, as in Reeves et al. (2007).