Solar Flare Waiting Time Distribution: Varying-Rate Poisson or Lévy Function?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The waiting time distribution for solar flares has beenconsidered. Using Geostationary Operational Environmental SatelliteX-ray data, we show that a local Poisson hypothesis for solar flaresis not consistent with observations, while the observed distributionis well reproduced by a Levy function, which displays asymptoticallya power-law tail. The origin of the observed waiting time distributionis then attributed to the fact that the physical process underlyingsolar flares is statistically self-similar in time and is characterizedby a certain amount of memory.