Abstract
The problems of deriving temperature structure for thermal hard X-ray sources and electron spectra for nonthermal sources, from their bremsstrahlung continuum spectra, are briefly reviewed and the dangers of model-fitting are reiterated. A more satisfactory approach is developed in terms of the evaluation of integral moments of the distribution function.Using thermal analysis of the impulsive solar hard X-ray burst of 1970 March 1 as an illustration, the integral moment method is shown to give a rapid assessment of the real information content of a bremsstrahlung spectrum. In particular it is shown that due to limitations of bandwidth and, to a lesser extent, of spectral resolution, current hard X-ray spectrometry alone is incapable of distinguishing isothermal, multithermal, and nonthermal sources. Criteria are established for the spectrometer needed to define a thermal source distribution to within some specified accuracy.
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