Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections: A Statistically Determined Flare Flux-CME Mass Correlation

TL;DR

This study statistically analyzes the correlation between solar flare flux and CME mass, revealing a broken power-law relationship that becomes a single power-law after bias correction, spanning a wide range of flare intensities.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive statistical correlation between flare flux and CME mass, accounting for observational biases and establishing a unified power-law relationship.

Findings

CME mass increases with flare flux following a broken power-law.

Bias correction reveals a single power-law relationship.

The correlation holds over three orders of magnitude in flare flux.

Abstract

In an effort to examine the relationship between flare flux and corresponding CME mass, we temporally and spatially correlate all X-ray flares and CMEs in the LASCO and GOES archives from 1996 to 2006. We cross-reference 6,733 CMEs having well-measured masses against 12,050 X-ray flares having position information as determined from their optical counterparts. For a given flare, we search in time for CMEs which occur 10-80 minutes afterward, and we further require the flare and CME to occur within +/-45 degrees in position angle on the solar disk. There are 826 CME/flare pairs which fit these criteria. Comparing the flare fluxes with CME masses of these paired events, we find CME mass increases with flare flux, following an approximately log-linear, broken relationship: in the limit of lower flare fluxes, log(CME mass)~0.68*log(flare flux), and in the limit of higher flare fluxes, log(CME mass)~0.33*log(flare flux). We show that this broken power-law, and in particular the flatter slope at higher flare fluxes, may be due to an observational bias against CMEs associated with the most energetic flares: halo CMEs. Correcting for this bias yields a single power-law relationship of the form log(CME mass)~0.70*log(flare flux). This function describes the relationship between CME mass and flare flux over at least 3 dex in flare flux, from ~10^-7 to 10^-4 W m^-2.