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Was There A Scientific Explanation For The Christmas Star?

If you know the Christmas story, you’ll probably remember a star that appeared in the east and guided three wise men to baby Jesus. But what was this star? Or was it a star at all? A new planetarium program at the Kalamazoo Valley Museumdiscusses scientific explanations for why this star might have appeared.

LaRue Clark-Russell is the planetarium technician at the museum and has worked there for 18 years. In order to figure out what could have caused this star to appear, Russell says we have to keep a few things in mind.

First, this celestial happening had to be an unusual event - something that isn’t in the sky all the time. Russell says back in those days, people were a lot more familiar with the stars - especially in Arab cultures. They used them for navigation, as a calendar, and as a way to tell stories.

“A lot of our stars have Arabic names actually. So we took a lot of the names that Arabic astronomers named the stars because after the burning of the library of Alexandria, we lost a lot of information. And fortunately a lot of that was still preserved in different areas. And so like many stars Aldebaran, Albireo just are two that pop in to my head,” says Russell.

The second important thing to remember is how long it took the wise men to reach Bethlehem. Stories about the three kings’ trip say they got there anywhere from a few months to two years after Jesus was born. So that rules out some events, like meteor showers.

“Meteor showers are very fleeting in what we see of them. They only last when the bit of debris hits the Earth’s atmosphere and burns brightly as it’s coming in,” says Russell.

Russell says a comet, however, can stay in the sky for months at a time.

“But they discount it being a comet partly because comets were harbingers of death and destruction. They were looked upon as evil omens, so probably not,” she says.

It also could have been the northern lights. Russell says that’s certainly not something someone so far south on the globe would see every day.

“There are rare events where they have been seen as far south as Florida. So there are rare events where the aurora borealis have become very extensive and widely seen,” she says.

It could have been a supernova. Russell says a supernova is basically an exploding star.

“There have been accounts of stars going supernova that we were able to see for a year in the sky, even during the daytime,” she says.

Russell says one of the more likely scenarios is that multiple planets came together, seeming to form one big star. Russell says in this case it was probably the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus.

“And right now we have - they’re starting to move apart a little, they have been quite close - is Jupiter, Venus, and Mars in the east. If you get up nice and early in the morning - not even all that early, but if we have clear skies - they have been three stars right in a row with Venus being quite bright the furthest to the east, then Mars, then Jupiter,” she says.

You can consider the theories about the Christmas star at the planetarium program “Mystery of the Christmas Star.” It opens November 27th and runs through January 1st.

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