☀️ Solar Flare & CME

The Flare class and X-ray flux stats come from a single JavaScript formula, not from the shader: flux = 10^(-8 + 5·a), where a is the Magnetic activity slider (0-1), nudged up by 45% of the current eruption envelope while Erupt! is playing. That flux is then bucketed into the real NOAA scale — A (10⁻⁸ W/m²) through X (10⁻⁴ W/m²) — with each letter a ten-fold step, exactly like real GOES X-ray sensor classifications.

No — inside this sandbox the CME is a GLSL shader effect, not an orbital-mechanics calculation. Pressing Erupt! ramps a single uFlareTrigger uniform from 0 to 1 and back over 4 seconds; that value drives a bright plume rendered as a radial glow shooting away from the active region along the sunspot-to-sun-centre direction. The 1-3 day transit time and Kp-index storm strength described in the info panel are real space-weather facts used for context, but they are not computed by this particular simulation's code.

Each loop is a parabolic arc between two footpoints straddling the sunspot, evaluated per-pixel by a loopArc() function in the fragment shader: it finds how far a screen point is from the parabola y = baseY + height·4t(1-t) and turns that distance into a glow via an exponential falloff. The Loop complexity slider sets how many of these arcs are drawn (1-9), each with slightly different height and pulsing brightness, and their height grows further while the eruption envelope is active.

That granulation is procedural value noise, not a fluid simulation: a fbm() function layers six octaves of a hashed value-noise field, and a plasma() function domain-warps that noise through itself twice to fake turbulent, curling flow. The result is scaled by a limb-darkening term (dimmer near the disc's edge, brighter toward its centre) and pushed through a blackbody-style colour ramp (hotRamp) whose bias is set by the Plasma temperature slider, which is why raising it shifts the surface from deep red toward white-hot.

Erupt! starts a 4-second envelope in JavaScript: the value rises linearly from 0 to 1 over the first 0.72s, holds at 1 until 1.8s, then decays linearly back to 0 by 4s, disabling the button meanwhile. That single number (uFlareTrigger) is fed to the shader, where it simultaneously raises the magnetic loops higher, brightens an exponential "reconnection flash" kernel centred on the active region, and unmasks a radial CME plume that streaks outward — all three effects switch on and off together because they share the same driving value.