There was a somewhat similar short story in the English Lit. assigned in high school. As I recall, its major character was a statistician who notice a correlation between the increasing number of sun spots and weird behavior in public. One day hundreds of people threw off their clothes in a blizzard, another day thousands of fish, wales and dolphins beached themselves. As time went on more sun spots and more bizarre behavior accelerated. Finally, he went out his door and the sun was one big sun spot surrounded by a bright corona. Then Bang everything abruptly ended as the supernova reached earth.