Nasa scientist claims to have found the Star of Bethlehem
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According to the Bible, when Baby Jesus was born, the three wise men, or magi, followed a star to find him. The story appears in the Bible’s Gospel of Matthew, describing how the star first appeared in the east before it guided them and stopped over the place where Jesus could be found. But this has puzzled researchers for years, as far as they were aware, there is no Star of Bethlehem in the universe. Well, now one Nasa scientist thinks he has the answer. (Picture: Getty)
Dr Mark Matney, a planetary scientist, suggested the fabled star may actually be a comet. He suggested the star was an object recorded by the Chinese from 5BC – a bright comet that was visible for more than 70 days, and nearly struck the Earth. Historians tend to place Jesus’s birth between 6BC and 5BC. (Picture: Getty)
So, Dr Matney analysed an object from ancient Chinese records, identifying a range of possible orbits consistent with the observations, and one reconstruction of the object’s movement suggested it would have become visible on a June morning in 5BC. He suggests that travellers moving south, towards Bethlehem, could have potentially spotted it ahead of them, and then appearing to linger overhead. (Picture: Getty)
Dr Matney published his findings in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association and wrote: ‘This is the first astronomical candidate for the Star ever identified that could have had apparent motion corresponding to the description in Matthew, where the Star ‘went before’ the Magi on their journey to Bethlehem until it “stood over” where the child Jesus was. (Picture: Getty)
He explains that a comet had passed so close by that it might ‘easily have been visible in the daytime’ and would have been ‘extraordinarily bright’. It could also create the strange appearance of a starlike object rising in the daylit sky and then appearing to stand still for a few hours. However, not everyone seems to agree with him. (Picture: Getty)
Dr Ralph Neuhäuser, an astrophysicist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, who also studies astronomy through history, says that the Chinese record may be misleading. ‘The older the record, in general, the less information is left. There have been at least 400 scholarly attempts to explain the truth of the Star of Bethlehem – including supernovas and planetary conjunctions.’ (Picture: Getty)
Dr Matt Bothwell, public astronomer at the University of Cambridge, agreed that the most likely explanation for the ‘star’ is a comet. He said: ‘I’m an astronomer not a historian obviously, but a comet feels like it could really be the explanation – we do get these very striking bright things which just hang in the sky and they happen once and don’t happen again for a very long time. Apparently around 5BC Chinese astronomers did notice a comet in the sky. They called it a “broom star” because it has this long fluffy tail, so that seems to strengthen the comet idea.’ (Picture: Getty)
