Universality in solar flare and earthquake occurrence

Earthquakes and solar flares are phenomena involving huge and rapid releases of energy characterized by complex temporal occurrence. By analyzing available experimental catalogs, we show that the stochastic processes underlying these apparently different phenomena have universal properties. Namely, both problems exhibit the same distributions of sizes, interoccurrence times, and the same temporal clustering: We find after flare sequences with power law temporal correlations as the Omori law for seismic sequences. The observed universality suggests a common approach to the interpretation of both phenomena in terms of the same driving physical mechanism.