# What determines the X-ray intensity and duration of a solar flare?

## TL;DR

This study investigates the relationships between solar flare properties, revealing that flare size correlates with physical parameters, while duration's correlation varies with flare magnitude, highlighting complexities in flare physics.

## Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical analysis of flare properties, showing that flare duration is not universally related to size or energy, unlike other basic properties.

## Key findings

- Flare size correlates with temperature, emission measure, and energy.
- Flare duration is independent of size in small flares but correlates with reconnection flux in large flares.
- Uncertainties in small flare measurements may affect correlation interpretations.

## Abstract

Solar flares are observed and classified according to their intensity measured with the GOES X-ray Sensors. We show that the duration of a flare, as measured by the full width at half maximum (FWHM) in GOES is not related to the size of the flare as measured by GOES intensity. The durations of X-class flares range from a few minutes to a few hours, and the same is true of M- and C-class flares. In this work, we therefore examine the statistical relationships between the basic properties of flares -- temperature, emission measure, energy, etc. -- in comparison to both their size and duration. We find that the size of the flare is directly related to all of these basic properties, as previously found by many authors. The duration is not so clear. When examining the whole data set, the duration appears to be independent of all of these properties. In larger flares, however, there are direct correlations between the GOES FWHM and magnetic reconnection flux and ribbon area. We discuss the possible explanations, finding that this discrepancy may be due to large uncertainties in small flares, though we cannot rule out the possibility that the driving physical processes are different in smaller flares than larger ones. We discuss the implications of this result and how it relates to the magnetic reconnection process that releases energy in flares.