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It is only a cartoon, of course, but the manner of opening the field lines reminds one of Frances Tang's "partial eruptions" (Solar Physics 105, 399, 1986).15 May 2007
This is the paper in which the foolishness of the electron beam model was first made clear... "The so-called nonthermal X-rays... cannot be due to a directed flux of electrons..." even with consideration of a return current. Colgate prefers to think of the hard X-rays as due to a power-law distribution of emission measure in a thermal process and daringly also suggests that the gamma-rays come from runaway protons as the current carriers.