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By Root 1427 0

in two. Physically, it’s a cloud of gas and particles that don’t reflect light from the surrounding stars. It looks like a dark streak streaming into the galactic center. The Maya saw it as a two-way road; the road moving into the center was known as the “dark road,” and led to a portal into the underworlds. The roadway out of the center was the “birth canal,” streaming out from the “womb of the world” (the Mayan name for the center of the galaxy).

The Milky Way in Mayan Mythology

The Milky Way was a central player in Mayan mythology. The center of the Milky Way, the “womb of the world,” was the place where the Maya believed all stars were born. Modern science seems to agree that the stars of the Milky Way were born in the black hole at its center. One Mayan glyph depicts the center of the Milky Way as a whirling disc, much as we might draw a black hole. If the Maya did not inherit this information from Atlantis, then their trances were pretty powerfully accurate!

Did the Maya know about galaxy cannibalism? One depiction of the Milky Way is as a great reptile extending across the entire sky. It’s a two-headed beast, one head creating life and the other consuming it. Again, science theorizes that the material consumed in galactic cannibalism is the raw material used to create new stars and planets.

The Sun: Ultimate Power Source

Our sun, like our solar system, is around 4.5 billion years old. Of all the celestial bodies, the impact of the sun on the earth is by far the greatest. In Mayan mythology, the Sun god ruled the heavens during the day and the underworlds at night. The sun was the source of life. It’s certainly true that all life on our planet is powered by energy from the sun. Activity on the surface of the sun also causes electrical storms on the earth and impacts our climate, an important factor leading toward 2012 that we’ll discuss in Chapter 15.

Sunspots

A sunspot is a dark area seen on the sun’s surface. It’s essentially a planet-size magnet created by concentrations of magnetic flux on the sun’s surface. Sunspots have north and south magnetic poles and arise in pairs of opposite polarity. One member of the pair lives in the northern hemisphere while its partner lives in the southern hemisphere. They’re linked together by loops of magnetic energy that arc across the sun between the two partners. They move in unison across the face of the sun. The life span of a pair of sunspots can be an hour, a day, or several months. Sunspot activity rises and falls in phases every 11 years. Sunspot activity creates enough electromagnetic energy to affect the electromagnetism of earth.

Sunspot Cycles

There’s always some type of sunspot activity happening on the sun’s surface. However, every 11 years there’s a surge of activity, called the solar maximum. Five to six years after the surge, or maximum activity time, there is a minimum activity period, called the solar minimum. During the surge, all the sunspots in the northern hemisphere of the sun have the same polarity and all the sunspots in the southern hemisphere have the opposite polarity of those in the northern hemisphere. During the next sunspot cycle, the polarities reverse.

Solar Flare

A solar flare is a sudden and dramatic release of energy near or in a sunspot. A flare can last for a few minutes to a few hours. During a solar flare, the ionization of the earth’s atmosphere increases. This causes an increase in aurora borealis activity and magnetic storms across the earth, which can cause radio interference and other technical problems.

Aurora Borealis

The aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, is caused by the interaction between the earth’s magnetic field and the charged particles that come from the sun called solar wind. It’s usually seen in the northern parts of the North Hemisphere such as Alaska and Siberia. The same thing happens at the South Pole, where it’s called the aurora australis, but as this is the tail of the magnetosphere, it’s less dramatic.

def•i•ni•tion

The magnetosphere is the ionized magnetic field around