The solar flare complex network

The extracted features demonstrate that the network of flares follows quantitative measures of complexity. The power-law nature of the connectivity distribution with a degree exponent greater than three reveals that flares form a scale-free and small-world network. A large value for the clustering coefficient, a small characteristic path length, and a slow change of the diameter are all characteristics of the flares network.

We show that the degree correlation of the flares network has the characteristics of a disassortative network. About 11% of the large energetic flares (M and X types in GOES classification) that occurred in the network hubs cover 3% of the solar surface.