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GEMSIS-Sun

Outline

A ‘solar flare’ resulting from a sudden release of the magnetic energy stored in the solar corona is the largest exploding phenomenon in our solar system. Once a flare occurs, a large amount of coronal plasma is strongly heated and ejected toward the interplanetary space. In a huge flare, very high-energy particles are also produced. However, the mechanism of particle acceleration is not understood yet. When the plasma ejected through the process of solar flares reaches our geospace, as it sometimes does, it has the potential to strongly disturb the Earth’s magnetosphere, yielding geomagnetic storms and aurora. Energetic particles may cause damage to satellites, and astronauts may also be exposed to them. Particle acceleration in solar flares is a very important issue to understand, not only from a scientific but also from a space-environmental point of view.
In the GEMSIS phase 2 (2010 - 2015), the solar cycle 24 reaches its maximum and large solar flares are highly produced. So we defined our final goal of systematically understanding the whole processes (energy-storage, flare trigger, energy-release, and particle acceleration) in solar flares, especially in large solar flares. In order to realize it, realistic models for the specific scientific targets, e.g., flare-trigger, particle acceleration, and so forth, are developped. Then, we try to compare observational results with these models and simulations in the phase 2.

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