New Years Day X-class solar flare

Did anyone else hear about this:
www.spaceweather.com...

Apparently there was an X-class solar flare on new's day. Coming after two years of unseasonal solar activity, I can't help but wonder if some predictions about solar 'killshots' might be partially true...

...then, again, perhaps our understanding of the sun is just poor and the idea of a steady 11-year solar cycle has to be thrown out.

I think the 11 year cycle is valid, but I believe they become more unstable as they approach a complete mega-cycle if you will. Stars like the sun cycle for a period of time like thousands of years and then have a major event of extreme over activity and then they settle back down until its time to do it again. They work up to a belch so to speak. A big fat one.

When you look at the Mayan calendar which seems to track the 11 year cycles of the sun, it might be safe to assume that the entire calendar marks one mega-cycle. I believe the calendar tracks about 5500 years of time. And the last day on that calendar is coded as SUN and STORM. So when it ends on 2012, there may be a heavy duty solar storm of some sort.

Now correlate that with the fact that chinese calendar has tracked into the 5000's, and their zodiac tracks in 12 year increments and 2012 is the year of the Dragon.

It sounds hokey, but the ancient stargazers may have been on to something. They spent a great deal of time on those astronomical observations.

Now how powerful a mega-cycle could be and what it would do, is anybody's guess.

A solar flare was listed as the cause of a pager satellite that died a few years ago. A really big solar flare would at the least completelly destroy our satellites

Originally posted by astral_ice
A solar flare was listed as the cause of a pager satellite that died a few years ago. A really big solar flare would at the least completelly destroy our satellites

Oh no! If it destroys our weather satellites then how will we know when its going to be sunny out?