The Great Christ Comet

by The Great Christ Comet- Revealing the True Star of Bethlehem (retail) (epub)

  The record would be dubious, were it not for the fact that it says that the vapor was extremely long and persisted for more than 10 days, with the stellar location explicitly noted. With that it met our selection criteria. We can rule out an aurora, a bolide trail, or an atmospheric phenomenon, and the record is consistent with the appearance of a comet whose coma was invisible below the horizon but whose tail stretched up into the sky at the terrestrial place and time in question.

  21 Pankenier et al., Archeoastronomy in East Asia, 21–25.

  22 Christopher Cullen, “Halley’s Comet and the ‘Ghost’ Event of 10 BC,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 32 (1991): 113–119, discusses a Chinese record in the Thung Chien Kang Mu (1189) that has been interpreted by some as referring to a comet in 10 BC. He argues that it is actually referring to Halley’s Comet in 12 BC. Of course, if the 10 BC comet recorded in the Thung Chien Kang Mu is not a wrongly dated record of Halley’s Comet in 12 BC, then we would have to add it to our count of Chinese comets from 50 BC to AD 50, making 11 (or 12). It is also sometimes claimed (dubiously, in my view) that the 4 BC cometary record is misdated and originally referred to the comet in the spring of 5 BC (see Kronk, Cometography, 1:26–27).

  23 Wolfram Eberhard, “The Political Function of Astronomy and Astronomers in Han China,” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 57–58. Michael Loewe, Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 67, 71n25, 75–76, points out the close association between cometary records and military campaigns. On pp. 81–83 he demonstrates that the 12 BC Chinese comet was preserved because it was regarded as having successfully augured events of great political significance. Note the AD 22 records of a “fuzzy star” that coincided with the beginning of Liu Yan’s rebellion against Wang Mang (who had usurped the throne in AD 9).

  24 See Eberhard, “Political Function,” 57–58. In 7–6 BC, the honeymoon period of Emperor Ai’s reign, the officials and people were united in believing that, after the incompetent rule of Emperor Yuan and the extravagant reign of Emperor Cheng, they now had a proficient emperor (Wikipedia, s.v. “Emperor Ai of Han,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Ai_of_Han [last modified March 22, 2013]). Any comet occurring at that time was liable to have been regarded as an auspicious omen and hence may have been of less interest to the court astrologers and the historian. Note how Homer H. Dubs, The History of the Former Han Dynasty, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Waverly, 1938–1955), 1:261, explains the lack of eclipses and comets recorded during Emperor Wen’s reign in the second century BC: “it looks as though the recorders of phenomena deliberately refused to record eclipses or comets, for the good reign of Emperor Wen made them think that Heaven was sending no admonitions, hence they concluded that there were no ‘visitations.’” Notably the historian introduces inauspicious comets, along with an increased number of other portents, in the period when the positive sentiment toward the emperor dissipated, namely in 5 BC and 4 BC. At that very time tensions within the palace were growing and Ai began to be perceived as harsh, indecisive, easily offended, and always sick, and became involved in a homosexual relationship with Tung Hsien. These negative omens were no doubt included by the historian writing the Han shu in order to make the point that doom was now destined for Ai and the Former Han dynasty.

  25 Zdenek Sekanina and P. W. Chodas—see, for example, “Fragmentation Hierarchy of Bright Sungrazing Comets and the Birth and Orbital Evolution of the Kreutz System. I. Two-Superfragment Model,” Astrophysical Journal 607 (2004): 624.

  26 Barrett, “Observations,” 81–106.

  27 Ibid., 94–98: catalog numbers 32–42.

  28 If Cullen, “Halley’s Comet and the ‘Ghost’ Event of 10 BC,” is wrong and the 10 BC comet is one that went unrecorded in the Han shu, it would be further evidence that those responsible for the Han shu were selective regarding which cometary records of the imperial astronomers they included in their work.

  29 Ramsey and Licht, Comet of 44 B.C., 47. David Pankenier, a respected authority on Chinese astronomical records, concurred with this assessment (personal email message to the author, October 6, 2012).

  30 Virgil, Georgic 1.488–489; Manilius, Astronomica 1.907–908; cf. Cassius Dio 47.40.2.

  31 Cassius Dio 54.19.7; Julius Obsequens, Liber de prodigiis 71.

  32 Cassius Dio 54.29.8.

  33 Ibid., 56.24.4; cf. Manilius, Astronomica 1.899–900.

  34 Hermann Hunger, F. Richard Stephenson, C. B. F. Walker, and K. K. C. Yau, Halley’s Comet in History (London: British Museum, 1985), 45. Ramsey and Licht, Comet of 44 B.C., 109n48, point out that astronomical records in the imperial archives “no doubt perished in the turmoil that followed the overthrow of the usurper Wang Mang” in AD 23 or 25.

  35 David W. Pankenier, “On the Reliability of Han Dynasty Solar Eclipse Records,” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 15.3 (2012): 211, states that, at times during the Former Han dynasty, the standard of record-keeping declined on account of cronyism, negligence, civil unrest, etc. Speaking more generally, York (“Reliability,” 121), in his doctoral study of the reliability of East Asian astronomical records, concludes that the fluctuating numbers of surviving comet records are explicable with reference to changes in the proficiency of astronomical observations, record-making, and record-keeping. He points out that, in their observations of conjunctions, the efficiency of Chinese astronomers ranged from 0% to 20%, and he suggests that this low rate probably applies to other astronomical phenomena (123).

  36 F. Richard Stephenson, “The Ancient History of Halley’s Comet,” in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, ed. Norman Thrower (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 238. The histogram he mentions is found on page 239 of Stephenson’s essay (fig. 13.3).

  37 Hunger et al., Halley’s Comet in History, 45.

  38 David Pankenier, Popular Astrology and Border Affairs in Early Imperial China, Sino-Platonic Papers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 4–5.

  39 See Cullen, “Halley’s Comet and the ‘Ghost’ Event of 10 BC,” 117, who emphasizes that a number of the Chinese constellations through which the comet traversed were of great astrological importance and that it is this fact that explains the “apocalyptic note” in the commentary. See also Loewe, Divination, 82.

  40 David W. Pankenier, “Notes on Translations of the East Asian Records Relating to the Supernova of AD 1054,” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 9.1 (2006): 80, which is a modification of a translation in Cullen, “Halley’s Comet and the ‘Ghost’ Event of 10 BC,” 117.

  41 Hunger et al., Halley’s Comet in History, 47.

  42 Hans Bielenstein, “An Interpretation of the Portents in the Ts’ien Han Shu,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 22 (1950): 127–143; idem, “Han Prognostications and Portents,” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 56 (1984): 97–112. Cf. R. de Crespigny, Portents of Protest in the Later Han Dynasty: The Memorials of Hsiang-k’ai to Emperor Huan (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), 45n15.

  43 Martin Kern, “Religious Anxiety and Political Interest in Western Han Omen Interpretation: The Case of the Han Wudi Period (141–87 B.C.),” Chūgoku shigaku 10 (2000): 1–31.

  44 So, for example, Eberhard, “Political Function,” 70; cf. 66.

  45 Ibid., 60–62, lists the 15 people whose reported portents were included in Han shu, series b, noting their political allegiances and biases and their tendencies to submit omens that furthered their private political agenda. Eberhard comments that “most of them had outspoken political loyalties and utilized their ‘science’ for the realization of their political aims” (62). With respect to fabrication, Zhang Lan and Zhao Gang, “The Identification of Comets in Chinese Historical Records,” Science China—Physics, Mechanics and Astronomy 54 (2011): 150–151, caution those working with the Chinese records
to appreciate that “some records” may have been “fabricated for political or other reasons.” See also Eberhard, “Political Function,” 50–51, 56, 59–60, and Loewe, Divination, 69, including footnote 18. Loewe states that because of, among other things, the possibility of fabrications in the Han astronomical records, “it is difficult to count the number of different [cometary] appearances that were recorded” (69).

  46 Dubs, History, 1:151; cf. Pankenier, “Reliability,” 200–212.

  47 Pankenier, “Reliability,” 211 (cf. Dubs, History, 3:559), highlights that deceiving the emperor by fabricating astronomical phenomena was a capital crime and indeed maintains that it was “suicidal” because such inventions could be “easily detected.”

  Appendix 2: The Meteor Storm of 6 BC

  1 Again, see Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1988), §79.31.

  2 With KJV, NIV, and NLT (“crowns”); also CEB and ISV (“royal crowns”).

  3 With NIV (“swept”) (cf. NASB, NET, and HCSB [“swept away”]), and KJV and RV (“drew”).

  4 However, this text seems to have in mind both the Messiah’s birth and the transition into the messianic age.

  5 By definition, meteor storms have at least 1,000 meteors an hour (or, more technically, would have a rate of 1,000 meteors per hour if the radiant were at the zenith) (Mark Littmann, The Heavens on Fire: The Great Leonid Meteor Storms [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 276 note c).

  6 Peter V. Bias, Meteors and Meteor Showers: An Amateur’s Guide to Meteors (Cincinnati, OH: Miracle Publishing, 2005), 11. I am grateful to the author for helping me secure a copy of this outstanding introduction to meteors.

  7 Ibid., 12. Although it is common to refer to “the 1998 Leonid Fireball Storm,” it was technically only a meteor shower.

  8 Littmann, Heavens on Fire, 16.

  9 Ibid., 17–18. To observers it seemed that the meteors, regardless of where in the sky they started, were radiating out from a particular point in the constellation Leo (ibid., 1–2). At the radiant, the meteors were little more than brightening dots (heading straight for the observer!); near the radiant they were short streaks; and farther out from the radiant they consisted of longer streaks (ibid., 253). Although meteoroids travel in parallel paths, striking Earth’s atmosphere at one point, they seem to radiate out as they come closer, like parallel railway tracks or like snowflakes sweeping toward a speeding car’s windscreen during a blizzard. Littmann (253) gives a wonderful description of what a meteor shower/storm looks like if you gaze directly at the radiant (italics his):

  Out of the corners of your eyes, you will catch meteors streaking past, creating the impression that you are flying through space . . . which of course you are. Your spaceship Earth is racing around the Sun at 18.5 miles per second (29.8 kilometers per second), but almost never can you sense this motion. The one exception is during a meteor storm, as the Earth dashes through a stream of particles. Then and only then can you truly sense the Earth in motion, in high-speed flight, a little like in Star Trek when the Enterprise travels at warp speed.

  10 One witness of the 1799 Leonid meteor storm stated that “there was not a space on the firmament equal in extent to three diameters of the moon which was not filled every instant with bolides and falling stars” (Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804, vol. 1, trans. T. Ross [London: George Bell & Sons, 1907], chapter 1.10).

  11 Littmann, Heavens on Fire, 273. David Asher and Robert McNaught famously developed a model explaining how the occurrences of the Leonids can be matched against particular past perihelion passages of the parent comet, enabling remarkably precise predictions of meteor outbursts. See R. H. McNaught and D. J. Asher, “Leonid Dust Trails and Meteor Storms,” WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization 27 (April 1999): 85–102; D. J. Asher, “Leonid Dust Trail Theories,” in Proceedings of the International Meteor Conference, Frasso Sabino, Italy, 23–26 September 1999, ed. R. Arlt (Potsdam: IMO, 2000), 5–21; and especially the section on the Armagh Observatory’s website entitled “Leonid dust trails”: http://www.arm.ac.uk/leonid/dustexpl.html (last modified September 8, 2010).

  12 See Peter Jenniskens and Jeremie Vaubaillon, “3D/Biela and the Andromedids: Fragmenting versus Sublimating Comets,” Astronomical Journal 134 (2007): 1037–1045.

  13 Bias, Meteors and Meteor Showers, 12.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Ibid., 196–197.

  16 Ibid., 2.

  17 Cf. ibid., 2–3.

  18 Mario Di Martino and Alberto Cellino, “Physical Properties of Comets and Asteroids Inferred from Fireball Observations,” in Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids, ed. M. J. S. Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 156.

  19 Peter Jenniskens¸ Meteor Showers and Their Parent Comets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 208.

  20 This was discovered by David J. Asher. See David J. Asher, Mark E. Bailey, and V. V. Emel’yanenko, “The Resonant Leonid Trail from 1333,” Irish Astronomical Journal 26.2 (1999): 91–93; David J. Asher, Mark E. Bailey, and V. V. Emel’yanenko, “Resonant Meteoroids from Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1333: The Cause of the Unexpected Leonid Outburst in 1998,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 304.4 (April 16, 1999): L53–L56.

  21 Bias, Meteors and Meteor Showers, 67.

  22 Jenniskens, Meteor Showers, 238. Technically, a -14.5-magnitude fireball would classify as a bolide.

  23 This is how most artists have tended to portray it. Ptolemy denominated γ (Gamma) Hydrae as “the star after Corvus, in the section by the tail (prope caudam)” (Ptolemy’s Almagest, trans. Toomer, 392)—the Latin prope caudam means “beside the tail.” Perhaps Ptolemy is envisioning the tail as curving around a couple of degrees to the side of γ Hydrae. However, Ptolemy’s predecessors Pseudo-Eratosthenes (Catasterismi 41) and Hyginus (Poetica Astronomica 2.40) certainly seem to have regarded γ Hydrae as part of Hydra’s body, not as being beside it (see Theony Condos, Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans: A Sourcebook [Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes, 1997], 120 and 122). Moreover, although we lack the star catalog of Hipparchus, we gather from his extant Commentary on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus that he regarded the tail as ending at π (Pi) Hydrae and as encompassing HIP65835, which is just 2½ degrees below γ (Gamma) Hydrae. This suggests that he imagined the tail as passing through γ Hydrae (see the index to constellations in the forthcoming English translation of Hipparchus’s Commentary by Roger MacFarlane and Paul Mills).

  24 Peter Jenniskens of NASA’s SETI Institute (personal email messages to the author, October 15 and November 27, 2012) was the first to work on the orbit. Then David Asher (personal email messages to the author, December 31, 2012, January 4, 2013, and August 6–7, 2013) recalculated the orbit in a J2000 ecliptic frame, using positions along the upper section of Hydra’s tail in this same reference frame, taking the vectors from NASA’s Horizons website. He assumed a viewing on or around 1719522.708333333 (October 19, 6 BC, 05:00 Coordinate Time) from Babylon (a viewing from Jerusalem produces virtually identical results, because it is on essentially the same latitude as Babylon). David took account of zenith attraction, which is an important factor, since the meteor storm is radiating from relatively close to the horizon. I am most grateful to Dr. Asher, who developed a meteor orbit calculation program to determine the possible orbits of the meteoroid stream giving rise to the Hydrid meteor storm of 6 BC.

  25 The higher the radiant of a meteor shower is relative to the horizon, the more of its meteors are visible (for more on this, see Bias, Meteors and Meteor Showers, 30–35). It is estimated that when a radiant is about 15 degrees above the horizon, you will see approximately one quarter of the meteors that would have been visible if the radiant had been at the zenith (ibid., 33 fig. 2.2). If the 6 BC Hy
drid meteor storm radiated from HIP59373 and was seen 66 minutes before sunrise, the radiant would have been approximately 15 degrees above the horizon. The 1799 Leonid meteor storm was observed by Alexander von Humboldt when the radiant was low on the eastern horizon from Cumana, Venezuela. During that window of time he reported seeing thousands and thousands of meteors and fireballs radiating out across the sky (von Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative, chapter 1.10). Similarly, the 1766 meteor storm was seen from Cumana, as well as from Quito, Ecuador, when the radiant was very low on the horizon (ibid.). Leonid meteor storms have been recorded with meteor hourly rates of several hundreds of thousands. If the 6 BC Hydrid storm was anything like the 1766, 1799, or 1833 Leonid storms in intensity, tens of thousands may have been visible per hour radiating from the Serpent’s tail.

  26 Medium-velocity meteoroids tend to make for brighter meteors than low-velocity meteoroids. Moreover, Gary Kronk notes that we usually see brighter meteors (and more meteors generally) in the period before dawn (“What Is a Meteor Shower?,” http://meteorshowersonline.com/what_is.html [accessed March 26, 2014]). In addition, meteoroid deposits resulting from comet fragmentation events may consist of a higher proportion of larger meteoroids, which make for brighter (and larger) meteors. The fact that some fireballs seem to have occurred during the 6 BC meteor storm (Rev. 12:4; see below) suggests that it was indeed characterized by a preponderance of bright meteors.

  27 On these meteor showers, see P. Brown, D. K. Wong, R. J. Weryk, P. Wiegert, “A Meteoroid Stream Survey Using the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar. II: Identification of Minor Showers Using a 3D Wavelet Transform,” Icarus 207.1 (2010): 78 table 4.

  28 Jenniskens, Meteor Showers, 110.

  29 Ibid.

  30 If the meteor storm radiated from higher up the tail, i.e., closer to HIP59373 than γ (Gamma) Hydrae, the velocity and inclination would be above what is normal for Jupiter-family orbits.