2012 phenomenon galaxy, or Earth's collision with a mythical planet called Nibiru. Scholars from various disciplines quickly dismissed predictions of concomitant cataclysmic events as they arose. Professional Mayanist scholars stated that no extant classic Maya accounts forecast impending doom, and that the idea that the Long Count calendar ends in 2012 misrepresented Maya history and culture, while astronomers rejected the various proposed doomsday scenarios as pseudoscience, easily refuted by elementary astronomical observations. December 2012 marked the conclusion of a "b'ak'tun"—a time period in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, used in Central America prior to the arrival of Europeans. Although the Long Count
Adoption of the Gregorian calendar 1 for 1868, "Taishō" 1 for 1912, "Shōwa" 1 for 1926, "Heisei" 1 for 1989, and so on. Still, this system has increasingly been replaced in popular usage by the "Western calendar" (西暦, "seireki") over the course of the twentieth century. Korea adopted the Gregorian calendar on 1 January 1895 with the active participation of Yu Kil-chun. Although the new calendar continued to number its months, there were multiple systems used to refer to its years: during the Joseon Dynasty, in 1895–97, its years were numbered from the founding of that dynasty, regarding 1392 as year one; then between 1897