Magnetic Signatures of Sympathetic Flares

Abstract:

Several studies show that the interaction between active regions can trigger flaring behavior (e.g. Wang et al. 2001, Moon et al. 2002, Schrijver & Title 2011, Shen et al. 2012, and Schrijver & Higgins 2015). This concept, described by Wheatland and Craig (2006) as sympathetic flaring, likely occurs when a flare triggers a global reconfiguration of the solar magnetic field. We attempt to investigate the magnetic signatures of sympathetic flaring by analyzing photospheric magnetic field maps, taken by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instrument aboard the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, of all the flaring active regions observed between 2010 and 2020. First, we calculate features that describe the aggregate flaring activity on the Sun at any given time. Second, we use vector autoregressive models from the open source scientific software package statsmodels (Seabold and Perktold, 2010) to model the time evolution of these aggregate features along with other physical features of the photospheric magnetic field, such the magnetic energy and flux. We find that sympathetic flaring does exist, but plays a fairly weak role in overall flaring activity. We propose a few other ideas to further investigate sympathetic flaring.