![\"Margherita](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Margherita_Bassi.png\")
<\/p>\nAn odd star brightened for more than 70 days in 5 B.C.E., according to a Chinese text. The object may have been a comet that looked like it rose, then stood still over Bethlehem<\/p>\n
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Margherita Bassi<\/a><\/p>\n | Daily Correspondent<\/p>\n December 15, 2025<\/p>\n Elihu Vedder’s 19th-century painting “Star of Bethlehem” \u201cAfter their audience with the king, [the wise men] set out,\u201d reads<\/a> chapter two of the Book of Matthew. \u201cAnd behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the biblical story of the Star of Bethlehem, the celestial object that seemingly guided three wise men, or magi, to baby Jesus. As far as stars go, however, this one behaved rather strangely, which has made it difficult for researchers to identify it as an astronomical event.<\/p>\n Some hypotheses include aligning planets, meteors and exploding stars, but these phenomena don\u2019t rise and suddenly stop as the Star of Bethlehem did. \u201cThis has often led to one of two conclusions: to assume the star was miraculous in nature, or to consign the entire story to the category of religious myth,\u201d writes Mark Matney<\/a>, a NASA planetary scientist, in a study published December 3 in the\u00a0Journal of the British Astronomical Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n But an analysis of ancient astronomical records may point to another possible explanation: a comet.<\/p>\n \u201cMy goal here was to not prove that this was the Star of Bethlehem but to show that the idea that no astronomical object can behave this way\u2014we can no longer say that,\u201d says Matney, who conducted the work independently of NASA, to\u00a0FOX 32 Chicago<\/a>\u2019s Anita Blanton.<\/p>\n He came up with the idea as a college student. Back then, he worked at a planetarium, where a Christmas sky show explained that no astronomical object could act as the biblical star did, Matney tells Scientific American<\/a>\u2019s Meghan Bartels. From an earthling\u2019s point of view, every celestial body rises in the east and sets in the west\u2014nothing should ascend in the southern sky and come to a standstill, as the Star of Bethlehem was described doing.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember sitting there saying, \u2018Oh, I know one that could do that,\u2019\u201d he tells the outlet.<\/p>\n A comet that takes hundreds to millions of years to orbit the sun might. Called long-period comets, these objects are thought to come from the\u00a0Oort Cloud<\/a>\u2014a theoretical shell surrounding the solar system that contains icy bodies.<\/p>\n Quick fact: About the Oort Cloud<\/p>\n Astronomer Jan Oort proposed in 1950 that some comets come from the Oort Cloud. It\u2019s thought to reside in the most distant regions of the solar system, approximately 100 times farther<\/a> from the sun than Pluto is.<\/p>\n If a bright comet cozied up to Earth at just the right speed, direction and distance, it could look like it\u2019s frozen in time for a little while, Matney tells FOX 32 Chicago.<\/p>\n So, he scoured ancient astronomical texts in search of such an event. A historical account from China documented a strange star that appeared in the year 5 B.C.E. and glowed for more than 70 days. Constructing an orbit for this odd star\u2014which Matney suspects was a comet\u2014resulted in a plausible explanation for the Star of Bethlehem. \u201cThis comet could have moved in such a way as to appear to \u2018go before\u2019 someone traveling from Jerusalem to Bethlehem and then \u2018stop\u2019 nearly overhead for about two hours,\u201d he writes in the paper. \u00a0<\/p>\n![\"artwork](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/smithsonian_feature_images_8.png\")
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\n Elihu Vedder, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/p>\n