叙述和介绍了太阳爆发的磁通量绳灾变理论和模型的发展过程,强调了建立这样的模型所需要的观测基础。讨论了由模型所预言的爆发磁结构的几个重要特征以及观测结果对这种预言的证实。在此模型的基础上,讨论了一个典型的爆发过程中所出现的不同现象及它们之间的相互关系。最后,介绍了作者的一项最新尝试:将太阳爆发的灾变理论和模型应用到对黑洞吸积盘间歇性喷流的理论研究当中,以及研究所取得的初步结果。
This work introduced and discussed the development of the catastrophe theory and model of solar eruptions and the related works. Solar flares, eruptive prominences, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are three different manifestations resulted from a single energy release process during the solar eruption. Any theory that attempts to explain the solar eruption needs to account for the energy driving the eruption, production of solar flare, eruption of prominence, and propagation of CME including large amounts of mass and magnetic flux in the outermost corona and interplanetary space. The fundamental base of observations for establishing such a theory and the associated model was addressed in the present work. It is well accepted that the energy driving solar eruptions is stored in the coronal magnetic field beforehand. Unceasing mass motions in the photosphere continue to displace the footpoints of the coronal magnetic field rooted in the dense photospheric plasma, building stress and thus the energy in the corona until the stored energy reaches a threshold. In this stage, the system evolves through a series of equilibrium configurations in the quasi-steady state, and the motion of the photosphere could be either shearing, or converging, or twisting, or emerging of new flux from the photosphere, or interacting of one magnetic configuration with others nearby, or combining of all these processes. The evolution after the stored energy exceeds the threshold turns from quasi-steady to dynamic, and the stored energy is released in a violent fashion as a result of the loss of equilibrium in the system. The transition of the evolution from gradual to violent constitutes the catastrophe according to the standard theory of the catastrophe. The loss of equilibrium stretches the closed magnetic field so severely that the field is effectively opened and produces a current sheet that separates the fields of opposite polarity. Magnetic reconnection invoked by various plasma instabilities inside the current sheet dif