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- 1 year agoGeophysics, radio astronomy, Japan, the ionosphere, X and gamma rays: all have contributed to my view of how solar flares and their partner coronal mass ejections (CMEs) work. A solar flare (and a CME, it turns out) has an "impulsive phase'' in which catastrophic and dominant energy release from magnetic storage takes place, resulting in particle acceleration. The impulsive restructuring of the coronal currents and fields leads directly (if still mysteriously) to the many observable phenomena, which canreach the surface of the Earth. In particular we now recognize that the term "impulsive phase'' correctly captures the basic morphology of the process: it is highly intermittent in both space and time, even though it underlies large-scale phenomena such as CME eruptions. We still cannot resolve the scales of the flare intermittency, but we can use in-situ observations of possibly analogous processes in the solar wind and magnetosphere for guidance.http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4577695673680907733&ei=mvLCSpT2KYSElgfglrzgBg&q=geophysics+lectures&hl=en#
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