A Remarkably Narrow RHESSI X-Ray Flare on 2011 September 25

The unusually narrow X-ray source imaged with the Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) during an impulsive spike lasting for ∼10 s during the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite C7.9 flare on 2011 September 25 (SOL2011-09-25T03:32) was only ∼2″ wide and ∼10″ long. Comparison with Helioseismsic and Magnetic Imager magnetograms and Atmospheric Imaging Assembly images at 1700 shows that the X-ray emission was primarily from a long ribbon in the region of positive polarity with little if any emission from the negative polarity ribbon. However, a thermal plasma source density of ∼1012 cm−3 estimated from the RHESSI-derived emission measure and source area showed that this could best be interpreted as a coronal hard X-ray source in which the accelerated electrons with energies less than ∼50 keV were stopped by Coulomb collisions in the corona, thus explaining the lack of the more usual bright X-ray footpoints. Analysis of RHESSI spectra shows greater consistency with a multi-temperature distribution and a low-energy cutoff to the accelerated electron spectrum of 22 keV compared to 12 keV if a single-temperature distribution is assumed. This leads to a change in the lower limit on the total energy in electrons by an order of magnitude, given the steepness of the best-fit electron spectrum with a power-law index of ∼6.