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1. Deconstructing Photospheric Spectral Lines in Solar and Stellar Flares

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad16da  

   Monson, Aaron J. ; Mathioudakis, Mihalis ; Kowalski, Adam F. ( February 2024 , The Astrophysical Journal)

   During solar flares, spectral lines formed in the photosphere have been shown to exhibit changes to their profiles despite the challenges of energy transfer to these depths. Recent work has shown that deep-forming spectral lines are subject to significant contributions from regions above the photosphere throughout the flaring period, resulting in a composite emergent intensity profile from multiple layers of the atmosphere. We employ radiative–hydrodynamic and radiative transfer calculations to simulate the response of the solar/stellar atmosphere to electron beam heating and synthesize spectral lines of Feito investigate the line-of-sight velocity fields information available from Doppler shifts of the emergent intensity profile. By utilizing the contribution function to deconstruct the line profile shape into its constituent sources, we show that variations in the line profiles are primarily caused by changes in the chromosphere. Up-flows in this region were found to create blueshifts orfalseredshifts in the line core dependent on the relative contribution of the chromosphere compared to the photosphere. In extreme solar and stellar flare scenarios featuring explosive chromospheric condensations, redshifted transient components can dominate the temporal evolution of the profile shape, requiring a tertiary component consideration to fully characterize. We conclude that deep-forming lines require a multicomponent understanding and treatment, with different regions of the spectral line being useful for probing individual regions of the atmosphere’s velocity flows.

    

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2. Solar Flare Ribbon Fronts. II. Evolution of Heating Rates in Individual Flare Footpoints

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad47e1  

   Kerr, Graham_S ; Polito, Vanessa ; Xu, Yan ; Allred, Joel_C ( July 2024 , The Astrophysical Journal)

   Solar flare ribbon fronts appear ahead of the bright structures that normally characterize solar flares, and can persist for an extended period of time in spatially localized patches before transitioning to “regular” bright ribbons. They likely represent the initial onset of flare energy deposition into the chromosphere. Chromospheric spectra (e.g., Hei10830 Å and the Mgiinear-UV lines) from ribbon fronts exhibit properties rather different to typical flare behavior. In prior numerical modeling efforts we were unable to reproduce the long lifetime of ribbon fronts. Here we present a series of numerical experiments that are rather simple but which have important implications. We inject a very low flux of nonthermal electrons (F= 5 × 10⁸erg s⁻¹cm⁻²) into the chromosphere for 100 s before ramping up to standard flare energy fluxes (F= 10¹⁰⁻¹¹erg s⁻¹cm⁻²). Synthetic spectra not only sustained their ribbon-front-like properties for significantly longer: in the case of harder nonthermal electron spectra, the ribbon front behavior persisted for the entirety of this weak-heating phase. Lengthening or shortening the duration of the weak-heating phase commensurately lengthened or shortened the ribbon front lifetimes. Ribbon fronts transitioned to regular bright ribbons when the upper chromosphere became sufficiently hot and dense, which happened faster for softer nonthermal electron spectra. Thus, the lifetime of flare ribbon fronts are a direct measure of the duration over which a relatively low flux of high-energy electrons precipitates to the chromosphere prior to the bombardment of a much larger energy flux.

    

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3. Bridging High-density Electron Beam Coronal Transport and Deep Chromospheric Heating in Stellar Flares

   https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/acb144  

   Kowalski, Adam F. ( February 2023 , The Astrophysical Journal Letters)

   The optical and near-ultraviolet (NUV) continuum radiation in M-dwarf flares is thought to be the impulsive response of the lower stellar atmosphere to magnetic energy release and electron acceleration at coronal altitudes. This radiation is sometimes interpreted as evidence of a thermal photospheric spectrum withT≈ 10⁴K. However, calculations show that standard solar flare coronal electron beams lose their energy in a thick target of gas in the upper and middle chromosphere (log₁₀column mass/[g cm⁻²] ≲ −3). At larger beam injection fluxes, electric fields and instabilities are expected to further inhibit propagation to low altitudes. We show that recent numerical solutions of the time-dependent equations governing the power-law electrons and background coronal plasma (Langmuir and ion-acoustic) waves from Kontar et al. produce order-of-magnitude larger heating rates than those that occur in the deep chromosphere through standard solar flare electron beam power-law distributions. We demonstrate that the redistribution of beam energy aboveE≳ 100 keV in this theory results in a local heating maximum that is similar to a radiative-hydrodynamic model with a large, low-energy cutoff and a hard power-law index. We use this semiempirical forward-modeling approach to produce opaque NUV and optical continua at gas temperaturesT≳ 12,000 K over the deep chromosphere with log₁₀column mass/[g cm⁻²] of −1.2 to −2.3. These models explain the color temperatures and Balmer jump strengths in high-cadence M-dwarf flare observations, and they clarify the relation among atmospheric, radiation, and optical color temperatures in stellar flares.

    

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4. Understanding Sun-as-a-Star Variability of Solar Balmer Lines

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/acd17d  

   Criscuoli, S. ; Marchenko, S. ; DeLand, M. ; Choudhary, D. ; Kopp, G. ( July 2023 , The Astrophysical Journal)

   Precise, high-cadence, long-term records of stellar spectral variability at different temporal scales lead to better understanding of a wide variety of phenomena including stellar atmospheres and dynamos, convective motions, and rotational periods. Here, we investigate the variability of solar Balmer lines (Hα,β,γ,δ) observed by space-borne radiometers (OSIRIS, SCIAMACHY, OMI, and GOME-2), combining these precise, long-term observations with high-resolution data from the ground-based NSO/ISS spectrograph. We relate the detected variability to the appearance of magnetic features on the solar disk. We find that on solar-rotational timescales (about 1 month), the Balmer line activity indices (defined as line-core to line-wing ratios) closely follow variations in the total solar irradiance (which is predominantly photospheric), thus frequently (specifically, during passages of sunspot groups) deviating from behavior of activity indices that track chromospheric activity levels. On longer timescales, the correlation with chromospheric indices increases, with periods of low correlation or even anticorrelation found at intermediate timescales. Comparison of these observations with estimates from semiempirical irradiance reconstructions helps quantify the contributions of different magnetic and quiet features. We conclude that both the lower sensitivity to network and in part the higher sensitivity to filaments and prominences, may result in complex, time-dependent relationships between Balmer and other chromospheric indices observed for the Sun and solar-like stars. The fact that core and wings contribute in a similar manner to the variability, and current knowledge of Balmer-lines formation in stellar atmospheres, supports the notion that Balmer line core-to-wing ratio indices behave more like photospheric rather than chromospheric indices.

    

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5. Search for Solar Flare Neutrinos with the KamLAND Detector

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac35d1  

   Abe, S. ; Asami, S. ; Gando, A. ; Gando, Y. ; Gima, T. ; Goto, A. ; Hachiya, T. ; Hata, K. ; Hayashida, S. ; Hosokawa, K. ; et al ( January 2022 , The Astrophysical Journal)

   We report the result of a search for neutrinos in coincidence with solar flares from the GOES flare database. The search was performed on a 10.8 kton-year exposure of KamLAND collected from 2002 to 2019. This large exposure allows us to explore previously unconstrained parameter space for solar flare neutrinos. We found no statistical excess of neutrinos and established 90% confidence level upper limits of 8.4 × 10⁷cm⁻²(3.0 × 10⁹cm⁻²) on the electron antineutrino (electron neutrino) fluence at 20 MeV normalized to the X12 flare, assuming that the neutrino fluence is proportional to the X-ray intensity.

    

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