I need this literally explained like I’m 5, well actually 4. My 4 year old is asking what a “solar flare” is.
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Solar flares aren’t really directly related to fusion. Flares are a surface process on top of the Sun, while fusion occurs in its core.
In literal 4 year old terms, a solar flare is a time when a small part of the Sun’s surface becomes much brighter than the Sun’s surface usually is. That part of the Sun gets much hotter for a moment, and hot things glow brighter.
In adult-trying-to-explain-to-4-year-old terms, a solar flare is a result of the complicated magnetic fields around the Sun. The Sun is made out of plasma, which is similar to a gas in that it’s individual particles flying around, but different in that the electrons and nuclei in the gas are split apart.
Since the particles have their own charges, they respond to the Sun’s magnetic field. But because they’re moving charges, they also *generate* that magnetic field. In general, plasmas under the effect of a magnetic field have very complex behavior as a result. And sometimes, this complex behavior results in a very “tangled” magnetic field that holds a *lot* of potential energy, in a manner similar to a very compressed spring.
As the plasma moves around, though, it can sometimes allow the magnetic field to suddenly relax into a much lower-energy state, transferring all that extra energy into movement of the particles in the plasma. That heats the plasma up to extremely high temperatures, since temperature is just the word we have for “how fast all the particles in something are flying around randomly”. This ultra-hot plasma glows, like all hot objects do, and the glow is particularly intense because the intensity of a glow depends strongly on temperature.
The fast-moving particles can also usually escape the Sun, which is why flares are associated with *mass ejections* where the Sun fires off a chunk of hot plasma. But not all flares result in mass ejections.
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