Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counterintuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfvén waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, α = 2 as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed >600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: preflare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that α = 1.63 ± 0.03. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfvén waves are an important driver of coronal heating.
Google Colaboratory, or "Colab" for short, is a multiuser, collaborative environment that allows anyone with access to Google and the internet to write and execute arbitrary python code through their browser. With recent calls to increase use of computation in physics education, Colab has the potential to be a valuable tool to allow students to collaboratively code together-particularly in an online environment. Through this work, we examine how student teams navigated collaboration challenges related to using Colab in an online environment to conduct data analysis for a course-based undergraduate research experience in physics. We analyze students' final written assignment of the course, a "memo to future researchers," through the framework of sociallyshared regulation of learning, to understand the challenges, regulations, and perceived goal attainment students discussed relating to their experience programming in teams online with Colab. We found that students struggled with version control issues when simultaneously writing, editing, and saving their work. This led to the need to use socially-shared regulatory strategies, including assigning and rotating roles from week to week and having clear, regular communication. Highlighting these students' experiences and their advice to future researchers can help inform instructional guidance on how to best promote productive teamwork in collaborative coding environments both online and in person. 2022 PERC Proceedings edited by Frank, Jones, and Ryan; Peer-reviewed, doi.org/10.1119/perc.2022.pr.Werth Published by the American Association of Physics Teachers under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.