6533b829fe1ef96bd128acae

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Modeling solar and stellar flares

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Abstract The thermal phase of solar X-ray flares has been described as heating-triggered evolution of plasma confined in coronal loops. This paper describes how the modeling of the thermal phase of spatially resolved solar X-ray flares has been extended to investigate spatially unresolved stellar X-ray flares with different scopes, aims and perspectives. Hydrodynamic models are able to describe the evolution of global flare features, such as the X-ray light curves, and to put constraints on heating location. Based on the solar analogy, either detailed hydrodynamic models or approximate analytical descriptions of the decay of flaring coronal loops or loop systems have been extensively applied to infer the size of stellar flaring regions. Approximate approaches tend to overestimate the size of the flaring regions, in particular in the presence of significant heating during the decay. Such heating is consistently diagnosed and included in a model based on extensive hydrodynamic modeling of decaying loops. Applications to recent data from Chandra and XMM-Newton missions, and present and future perspectives are discussed.