Analysis of magnetic polarities in active regions for the prediction of solar flares

Abstract

Solar active regions, and the processes that occur in them, have been extensively studied and analyzed, generating many types of models and characterizations for the occurrence of different eruptive events that take place in the solar atmosphere. Within these regions, the most characteristic ones are those that have opposite magnetic polarity and that, in their majority, generate explosive events, such as the so-called solar flares. The flares are intense explosions occurring in the solar atmosphere which can have adverse effects on the Earth and the technology developed by humans, as well as being determining factors in the so-called space weather. For this reason, attempts have been made to predict the occurrence of these events. In this work, a predictive model of solar flares higher than M5 will be developed based on the articles proposed by Korsos et.al., (2014, 2015), using the relationship between the flares and the active bipolar regions. The analysis takes into account the areas of the sunspots’ umbra of opposite polarity, their average magnetic field and the magnetic barycenter’s of each sunspot in the region for a sample of three active regions, finding their temporal variation due to the evolution of the sunspots, confirming previous work in the literature. A statistical analysis is carried out to inspect whether after the occurrence of a flare, another can arise in subsequent hours.