Statistical Relation between Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections with Respect to Sigmoidal Structures in Active Regions

TL;DR

This study statistically analyzes the relationship between solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and sigmoidal structures, revealing key dependencies and differences between on-disk and limb events, with implications for CME prediction.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical comparison of features related to CMEs, flares, and sigmoidal structures, highlighting new differences between on-disk and limb events and their predictive value.

Findings

Sigmoidal structures are more associated with CMEs in on-disk events.

LDEs show stronger dependency on CMEs than large X-ray flares.

Non-sigmoidal regions produce fewer eruptive events.

Abstract

Statistical dependencies among features of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), solar flares, and sigmoidal structures in soft-X-ray images were investigated. We applied analysis methods to all the features in the same way in order to investigate the reproducibility of the correlations among them, which may be found from the combination of previous statistical studies. The samples of 211 M-class and X-class flares, which were observed between 2006 and 2015 by Hinode/X-ray telescope, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory/Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph, and GOES, were examined statistically. Five kinds of analysis were performed: Occurrence rate analysis, linear-correlation analysis, association analysis, the Kolmogorov--Smirnov test, and Anderson-Darling test. The analyses show three main results. First, the sigmoidal structure and long duration events (LDEs) has stronger dependency on the CME occurrence than large X-ray class events in on-disk events. Second, for the limb events, the significant dependency exists between LDEs and CME occurrence, and between X-ray class and CME occurrence. Third, there existed 32.4% of on-disk flare events, which had sigmoidal structure and were not accompanied by CMEs. However, the occurrence probability of CMEs without sigmoidal structures is very small, 8.8 %, in on-disk events. While the first and second results are consistent with previous studies, we newly provided the difference between the on-disk events and limb events. The third result that non-sigmoidal regions produce less eruptive events is also different from previous results. We suggest that sigmoidal structures in soft X-ray images will be a helpful feature for CME prediction regarding on-disk flare events.