Solar flares in the Solar Orbiter era: Short-exposure EUI/FSI observations of STIX flares

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the value of short-exposure EUV imaging from Solar Orbiter in studying solar flare dynamics, revealing substructures and aiding in constraining electron energy flux for flare modeling.

Contribution

It introduces the use of short-exposure EUI/FSI observations during flares and shows their potential for detailed diagnostics and modeling constraints.

Findings

Short-exposure EUI/FSI images reveal substructure in flaring ribbons.

Brightest regions in EUV images overlap with hard X-ray emission.

Over 9000 flares observed with at least one short-exposure EUV image.

Abstract

Aims: This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of short-exposure extreme ultraviolet (EUV) observations of solar flares in the study of particle acceleration, heating and energy partition in flares. This work highlights the observations now available from the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument suite on board Solar Orbiter while operating in short-exposure mode. Methods: A selection of noteworthy flares observed simultaneously by the Spectrometer Telescope for Imaging X-rays (STIX) and the Full Sun Imager of EUI (EUI/FSI) are detailed. New insights are highlighted and potential avenues of investigation are demonstrated, including forward-modelling the atmospheric response to a non-thermal beam of electrons using the RADYN 1D hydrodynamic code, in order to compare the predicted and observed EUV emission. Results: The examples given in this work demonstrate that short-exposure EUI/FSI observations are providing important diagnostics during flares. A dataset of more than 9000 flares observed by STIX (from November 2022 until December 2023) with at least one short-exposure EUI/FSI 174 \r{A} image is currently available. The observations reveal that the brightest parts of short-exposure observations consist of substructure in flaring ribbons that spatially overlap with the hard X-ray emission observed by STIX in the majority of cases. We show that these observations provide an opportunity to further constrain the electron energy flux required for flare modelling, among other potential applications.