Investigation of Thickness and Electrical Resistivity of the Current Sheets in Solar Eruptions

A discussion of the thickness of current sheets in solar eruptions led Lin et al. in 2007 to estimate very large values for the effective resistivity. This paper addresses some questions raised by that paper. The limb synoptic map technique is applied to find the current sheet thickness to be between 5.OE4 and 4.6E5 km, increasing with both time and altitude. The possibility that large apparent values result from projection effects is examined and rejected. Theoretical scaling laws corroborate this conclusion.