X-ray Source Heights in a Solar Flare: Thick-target versus Thermal Conduction Front Heating

Abstract

Observations of solar flares with RHESSI have shown X-ray sources traveling along flaring loops, from the corona down to the chromosphere and back up. The 28 November 2002 C1.1 flare, first observed with RHESSI by Sui et al. 2006 and quantitatively analyzed by O'Flannagain et al. 2013, very clearly shows this behavior. By employing numerical experiments, we use these observations of X-ray source height motions as a constraint to distinguish between heating due to a non-thermal electron beam and in situ energy deposition in the corona. We find that both heating scenarios can reproduce the observed light curves, but our results favor non-thermal heating. In situ heating is inconsistent with the observed X-ray source morphology and always gives a height dispersion with photon energy opposite to what is observed.