Collaborative Research: SHINE: Observational and Theoretical Investigation of Solar Flare Ribbon Elongation

Montana State University, Bozeman MT

Investigators

Abstract

This 3-year collaborative SHINE project will provide new physical insights into the energy release in solar flares, which is an important component of space weather research and is of high importance to society at large. The project will explore the physical processes of magnetic reconnection spreading and particle energization, which have applications beyond the SHINE program. Thus, the expected outcome of this project should be of use for applications in the Earth's magnetosphere, and potentially laboratory and fusion experiments. The project activities will promote training and learning through the funding of two graduate students. The lead PI will continue to supervise undergraduate students' research through an NSF-sponsored REU program at the MSU. Thus far, the lead PI has supervised 13 REU students, with six of them being female students. The non-lead PI will continue his productive partnership with the Children's Discovery Museum of West Virginia as part of this project. The research and EPO agenda of this project supports the Strategic Goals of the AGS Division in discovery, learning, diversity, and interdisciplinary research. This collaborative SHINE project will explore a novel and independent technique to estimate magnetic fields at reconnection sites high in the solar corona. This region of the solar atmosphere is currently inaccessible to direct observations, and therefore of great interest to the SHINE community. The project team will determine observationally and numerically whether there is a correlation between the guide magnetic field strength and particle acceleration; a link between the two would provide a novel way to estimate particle acceleration from observations of solar-flare ribbon spreading. The problem of magnetic reconnection spreading is of broad interest to the SHINE community for a number of applications, including prominence eruptions, and greatly expanding the region of reconnection in the turbulent solar wind.