What determine Solar Flares Producing Interplanetary Type III Radio Bursts?

TL;DR

This study analyzes solar flares to identify factors influencing the production of interplanetary type III radio bursts, highlighting the roles of flare properties and associated coronal mass ejections in their occurrence.

Contribution

It provides a statistical analysis of flare characteristics and their association with CMEs, revealing factors that increase the likelihood of interplanetary type III burst production.

Findings

Approximately 50% of M-class flares produce interplanetary type III bursts.

Flares with IT3 have longer durations and higher peak fluxes.

Associated CMEs are wider, faster, and more common in flares with IT3.

Abstract

Energetic electrons accelerated by solar flares often give rise to type III radio bursts at a broad waveband and even interplanetary type III bursts (IT3) if the wavelength extends to decameter-kilometer. In this Letter, we investigate the probability of the flares that produce IT3, based on the sample of 2272 flares above M-class observed from 1996 to 2016. It is found that only 49.6% of the flares are detected to be accompanied with IT3. The duration, peak flux, and fluence of the flares with and without IT3 both present power-law distributions in the frequency domain, but the corresponding spectral indices for the former (2.06$\pm$0.17, 2.04$\pm$0.18, and 1.55$\pm$0.09) are obviously smaller than that for the latter (2.82$\pm$0.22, 2.51$\pm$0.19, and 2.40$\pm$0.09), showing that the flares with IT3 have longer durations and higher peak fluxes. We further examine the relevance of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) to the two groups of flares. It is found that 58% (655 of 1127) of the flares with IT3 but only 19% (200 of 1078) of the flares without IT3 are associated with CMEs, and that the associated CMEs for the flares with IT3 are inclined to be wider and faster. This indicates that CMEs may also play a role in producing IT3, speculatively facilitating the escape of accelerated electrons from the low corona to the interplanetary space.