Solar X-rays in the energy range 1–100 keV originate in hot plasmas and streams of energetic electrons in solar flares, and since these phenomena may represent a significant fraction of the energy in a flare, an understanding of them is important for any flare theory. This paper presents the results of the University of California, San Diego, solar X-ray instrument on the OSO-7 satellite. Study of the time evolution of the emission measure in a typical burst indicates that the growth of soft X-ray emission is due to the addition of new hot material to the flare plasma, and the study of the time evolution of the temperature of the plasma indicates that conduction is the dominant cooling mechanism. Comparison of the hard (10–100 keV) and soft (5–10 keV) data indicates that the main heat input to the flare plasma is not collisions by the electrons which make the hard X-rays. The fraction of soft X-ray bursts observed by the instrument which also have a detectable hard X-ray component is this result is the same for bursts which occured near the center of the disk (θ < 60°) and for those bursts believed to have been partly occulted by the limb, indicating that hard X-ray emission comes at least part from high in the corona. For a sample of 62 hard X-ray bursts which occurred near or beyond the limb, the spectral index of the hard X-ray power law was significantly larger, as compared with the spectra of a comparable number which occurred at solar longitudes less than 60°.
Abundances of Potassium, Argon, and Sulphur in Solar Flares