Searching for solar shocks

Hugh S. Hudson 
UCSD/SPRC/ISAS

Large-scale astrophysical shock waves made a splashy appearance in the
solar corona in the 1940's as the "slow drift" meter-wave radio emissions,
now termed Type II Bursts. It took about half a century, but finally
X-ray astronomy has caught up with this phenomenon, which has interesting
relevance not only in astrophysics, but also for "space weather." In this
lecture I discuss soft X-ray observations of flare-associated shock fronts
and what they tell us about what causes the waves.