• SwingingTheLamp
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    11 months ago

    The Door Peninsula Astronomical Society shared this comment on their Facebook page:

    There has been a lot of misleading and confusing articles floating around about the 13th I’ve seen. Sure, it could happen or it might not. Seems that they came up with that date since about a month ago there was an event, and with the sun rotating in about 27 day someone came up with July 13th as the date. This could happen, but only if there is a good CME (coronal mass ejection - or big solar “burp”) which also would have to be directed at the Earth. Sometime a glancing blow will give a show, but the good ones will be when we take a direct hit. A direct hit could possibly wreak havoc with satellites, electrical grids, and other things we depend on. But it would give a pretty cool show at least! When there is a CME, it’s detected in about 8 minutes (speed of light across ~93 million miles), but the charged particles that hit the Earth take 24 to 48-ish hours to reach us. So if the 13th is the date, we would need a good (and well directed) solar flare sometime around the 10th. We’ll just have to watch the sun and see if it comes true!