Solar Flares Complex Networks

TL;DR

This paper models solar flares as a complex network, revealing scale-free, small-world, and disassortative properties, and analyzes their spatial and energetic characteristics over a decade.

Contribution

It introduces a novel network-based approach to analyze solar flare activity, highlighting the network's scale-free and small-world features and their implications.

Findings

Flares network follows a power-law degree distribution.

Network exhibits small-world and scale-free properties.

Large energetic flares are concentrated in network hubs.

Abstract

We investigate the characteristics of the solar flares complex network. The limited predictability, non-linearity, and self-organized criticality of the flares allow us to study systems of flares in the field of the complex systems. Both the occurrence time and the location of flares detected from January 1, 2006 to July 21, 2016 are used to design the growing flares network. The solar surface is divided into cells with equal areas. The cells, which include flare(s), are considered as nodes of the network. The related links are equivalent to sympathetic flaring. The extracted features present that the network of flares follows quantitative measures of complexity. The power-law nature of the connectivity distribution with a degree exponent greater than three reveals that flares form a scale-free and small-world network. The great value of the clustering coefficient, small characteristic path length, and slowly change of the diameter are all characteristics of the flares network. We show that the degree correlation of the flares network has the characteristics of a disassortative network. About 11% of the large energetic flares (M and X types in GOES classification) that occurred in the network hubs cover 3% of the solar surface.