Investigation of Relationship Between High-Energy X-ray Sources and Photospheric and Helioseismic Impacts of X1.8 Solar Flare of October 23, 2012

• Published in: arXiv.org 2017-06
• Main Authors: Sharykin, Ivan N, Kosovichev, Alexander G, Sadykov, Viacheslav M, Zimovets, Ivan V, Myshyakov, Ivan I
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Atmospheric models; Computational fluid dynamics; Electron energy; Filtergrams; Fluid flow; Hydrodynamics; Photosphere; Solar activity; Solar atmosphere; Solar flares; Solar observatories; Spatial data; Spatial resolution; X ray sources
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1703.03767

The X-class solar flare of October 23, 2012, generated continuum photospheric emission and a strong helioseismic wave ("sunquake") that points to an intensive energy release in the dense part of the solar atmosphere. We study properties of the energy release with high temporal and spatial resolutions, using photospheric data from the Helioseismic Magnetic Imager (HMI) onboard Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), and hard X-ray observations made by the Ramaty High-Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). For this analysis we use level-1 HMI data (filtergrams), obtained by scanning the Fe I line (6731~\AA) with the time cadence of \(\sim 3.6\) s and spatial resolution of \(\sim 0.5^{\prime\prime}\) per pixel. It is found that the photospheric disturbances caused by the flare spatially coincide with the region of hard X-ray emission, but are delayed by \(\lesssim 4\) seconds. This delay is consistent with predictions of the flare hydrodynamics RADYN models. However, the models fail to explain the magnitude of variations observed by the HMI. The data indicate that the photospheric impact and helioseismic wave might be caused by the electron energy flux substantially higher than that in the current flare radiative hydrodynamic models.