White-light continuum emission from a solar flare and plage

TL;DR

This study analyzes white-light continuum emissions during a major solar flare, revealing that some emissions originate from plages and faculae, not just flare kernels, enhancing understanding of the solar chromosphere and photosphere.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the spatial, spectral, and temporal evolution of white-light emissions, distinguishing flare and plage contributions during a significant solar event.

Findings

Some continuum emissions are from plages rather than flare kernels.

Continuum emission from flare kernels can resemble faculae.

Active region areas producing continuum emission are often plages.

Abstract

Observations of flare emissions in the optical continuum are very rare. Therefore, the analysis of such observations is useful and may contribute to our understanding of the flaring chromosphere and photosphere. We study the white light continuum emission observed during the X6.9 flare which occurred on August 09, 2011. This emission comes not only from the flare ribbons but also from the nearby plage area. The main aim of this work is to disentangle the flare and plage (facula) emission. We analyzed the spatial, spectral and temporal evolution of the flare and plage properties by analyzing multi-wavelength observations. We study the morphological correlation of the whitelight continuum emission observed with different instruments. We found that some active region areas which produce the continuum emission correspond rather to plages than to the flare kernels. We showed that in some cases the continuum emission from the WL flare kernels is very similar to the continuum emission of faculae.