The local Poisson hypothesis for solar flares

dc.creatorWheatland, M. S.
dc.date2001-07-09
dc.date.accessioned2026-07-25T18:13:23Z
dc.descriptionThe question of whether flares occur as a Poisson process has important consequences for flare physics. Recently Lepreti et al. presented evidence for local departure from Poisson statistics in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) X-ray flare catalog. Here it is argued that this effect arises from a selection effect inherent in the soft X-ray observations; namely that the slow decay of enhanced flux following a large flare makes detection of subsequent flares less likely. It is also shown that the power-law tail of the GOES waiting-time distribution varies with the solar cycle. This counts against any intrinsic significance to the appearance of a power law, or to the value of its index.
dc.description8 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters
dc.identifierhttps://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0107147
dc.identifierhttp://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0107147
dc.identifier.urihttps://dspace.dare.co.zw/handle/123456789/54290
dc.subjectAstrophysics
dc.titleThe local Poisson hypothesis for solar flares
dc.typetext

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