When Will There Be a Full Moon and Friday the 13th Again

We're not superstitious. But if you are, yous might want to know that a full moon is falling on Friday the 13th this week .

Specifically, the full moon occurs at precisely 12:xi am EDT on Thursday night — i.e., early Friday morning time. That ways the 13th volition coincide with the full moon for residents of the Eastern time zone (as well equally South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia), but non the Central, Mountain, or Pacific time zones.

Information technology's pretty rare for these two events to fall on the same 24-hour interval. The last time information technology happened was October 13, 2000. The next time volition be August 13, 2049.

Of form, there'southward admittedly no evidence that Friday the 13th is unlucky, or that the full moon changes human beliefs.

To delve deeper into the math backside this phenomenon — and the evidence regarding the (nonexistent) effects of full moons and Friday the 13th — read on.

Why is a Friday the 13th full moon so rare?

Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

The reply is basic arithmetics.

For a full moon to fall on a Friday the 13th, you need a confluence of three independent conditions — the moon stage (total), the day of the week (Friday), and the day of the calendar month (13th). To go the probability of all iii happening, yous multiply the probably of each by each other.

On average, at that place are 12.37 total moons in a yr and 365.25 days in a yr (because of jump years). So the odds of any ane day being a full moon are iii.39 pct (we're going to practise some rounding hither).

There are seven days in a week, and then the odds of any one day beingness a Friday are ane in 7, or xiv.29 percent.

There are 12 13th's in a year (each calendar month has exactly 1). So the odds of any one day existence a 13th is 12/365.25, or three.29 percentage.

To get the odds of whatever i day being all 3 of these things, merely multiply the percentages by each other. The event is .0159 percent.

Then, to get the odds of a year having this happen, you multiply by 365.25 — and then the odds of a year having a Fri the 13th full moon are simply 5.81 percent. That means it happens, o n average, every 20 years or and then.

Of course, this is merely an average probability — sometimes it'll happen more often, and sometimes less. To know exactly when the full moon Friday the 13ths autumn, y'all'd demand to consult a moon schedule and our Gregorian agenda, which the kind folks at ResearchManiacs.com take done for us.

Full moon on Friday the 13th:

ResearchManiacs.com

It'due south worth mentioning that only having ii of the events coincide is much less rare. At that place's a full moon on whatever 13th (not necessarily Friday) every three years or so, and in any given year, there are commonly betwixt one and 3 Friday the 13th's.

Do bad things actually happen on Friday the 13th?

Y'all may be reading this post because you believe Friday the 13th is unlucky.We're here to dispel that thought.

Atul Gawande looked at information technology for Slate when the total moon savage on Friday the 13th dorsum in 1998. He noted that, at the fourth dimension, at that place was just one legitimate study on the topic, and it did discover that traffic accidents in a London suburb increase on Fri the 13th.

His caption was that this was a random, meaningless finding from one narrow dataset. After all, Friday the 13th is just an artifact of our Gregorian calendar, so there's no known mechanism through which it could cause bad luck.

A more interesting hypothesis is that while Fri the 13th itself doesn't cause bad luck, information technology does cause people to behave differently out of fear or anxiety,thereby causing things like accidents, which we attribute to "bad luck."

But there have been more studies of Fri the 13th since Gawande wrote that commodity — and the data suggests this doesn't happen either. A Finnish study plant that female drivers were more likely to get in accidents on the mean solar day, only a subsequent study found the correlation disappeared with better data and more controls. A German study similarly institute that the number of accidents that occur during hospital operations is pretty much the same on Friday the 13th as on other days.

A few other studies have looked at the very plausible idea that stock markets might perform more than poorly on Friday the 13th — considering of investors' superstition — but they found the markets actually do slightly better, on average, than on other days.

Do people actually go crazy when there's a full moon?

Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images

This idea is a little more plausible than the previous one. Unlike the Gregorian calendar, we evolved with the lunar cycle in place, so it'southward conceivable information technology could bear on our behavior in ways we don't yet understand.

But the data, again, says that this isn't truthful.

Police departments oftentimes anecdotally link a full moon to surges in crime, and individual studies, at times, have shown correlations between the lunar cycle and arrests or mental instability. But they seem to be the result of tiny data sets or misleading analyses.

More substantive meta-analyses have repeatedly found no link between full moons and any effects of temporary insanity, including fierce criminal offence.

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Update: This commodity was edited to clarify that which time zones will have the total moon on the 13th.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/6/12/5801196/tomorrow-is-friday-the-13th-and-a-full-moon-that-wont-happen-again

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