A solar flare can reach Earth in about eight minutes, and its impulsive radiation can harm astronauts in space and technology on the ground. Physicists have constructed various empirical models to explain the occurrence and properties of solar flares, but their accuracy remains low. Kanya Kusano of Nagoya University in Japan and his colleagues considered solar flares from a mechanistic, physics-based approach. In their concept, magnetic reconnection triggers a double-arc magnetic loop instability that then disperses some of the free energy released during a solar flare. Following that line of reasoning, Kusano and his colleagues developed a flare model that provided lead times of a few hours to an entire day.
One of the flares they used to test their model is pictured here in the upper left area of the image and occurred in 2012. To better understand such large flares, the researchers tuned their model using what they...
