High-Energy Gamma-Ray Emission From Solar Flares: Summary of Fermi LAT Detections and Analysis of Two M-Class Flares

Understand

We present the detections of 19 solar flares detected in high-energy gamma rays (above 100 MeV) with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) during its first four years of operation.

• Interestingly, all flares are associated with fairly fast Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and are not all powerful X-ray flares.
• We then describe the detailed temporal, spatial and spectral characteristics of the first two long-lasting events: the 2011 March 7 flare, a moderate (M3.7) impulsive flare followed by slowly varying gamma-ray emission over 13 hours, and the 2011 June 7 M2.5 flare, which was followed by gamma-ray emission lasting for 2 hours.
• We compare the Fermi-LAT data with X-ray and proton data measurements from GOES and RHESSI.