AN ANALYSIS OF THE SOLAR FLARE WAITING TIME DISTRIBUTION

摘要

The distribution of waiting times between solar flares is examined, by means of soft X-ray data acquired by the GOES satellites. We show that a local Poisson hypothesis for the occurrence of flares is not consistent with observations. The waiting time distribution is well reproduced by a Levy function, which gives a power law tail in the limit of large waiting times. This behavior indicates the occurrence of statistical self-similarity in the process and supports the idea that the flare sequence is characterized by the presence of temporal correlations.