  Earthquakes and solar flares are phenomena involving huge and rapid releases
of energy characterized by complex temporal occurrence. By analysing 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, inter-occurrence times and the same
temporal clustering: we find afterflare 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.
