A solar flare may send a shockwave through communications devices like cell towers and GPS satellites when it arrives to Earth on Friday.
This is bad news for the superstitious, who already know it's not only Friday the 13th, but a full moon, too. The solar flare makes for a trifecta of bad omens.
According to ABC News, the "X-class" solar flares erupted on the surface of the sun on June 10 and 11. Sometimes, these flares can cause what's called a "coronal mass ejection" comprised of plasma and radiation. These ejections can become mini geomagnetic storms when they enter the Earth's atmosphere, and have been known to cause communications blackouts.
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that one such ejection will arrive on Friday, and comes as part of the roughly 11-year cycle in which the sun enters its "solar maximum" phase — a time when it produces more flares.
"It's back," Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center said in a statement this week,
The Huffington Post reported. "Solar Max has arrived."
ABC affiliate WHAM Rochester got a hold of Stuart Vyse, a psychology professor at Connecticut College and author of the book "Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition," who said cosmic events like these rank among the highest of anxiety-inducing occurrences in superstitious persons.
"People tend to try to read something into coincidences like these," said Vyse, "Astronomical events tend to be seen as very momentous and almost biblical in nature. It’s seen as being very powerful and something you can’t do anything about. It makes sense to me that it, too, would be connected to the general fears about Friday the 13th and the full moon."
Regarding the full moon, he said that research shows that there is no statistical uptick in aggressive or lunatic behavior. Scientists at NASA likewise say that coronal mass ejections pose no threat to humans beyond disrupting our communications devices.
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