The Star of Bethlehem is Not the Nova DO Aquilae (Nor Any Other Nova, Supernova, or Comet)

Bradley E. Schaefer

Published 2013-11-29Version 1

The Star of Bethlehem is only known from a few verses in the Gospel of Matthew, with the Star inspiring and leading the Magi (i.e., Persian astrologers) to Jerusalem and ultimately worshipping the young Jesus Christ in Bethlehem. In the last four centuries, astronomers have put forth over a dozen greatly different naturalistic explanations, all involving astronomical events, often a bright nova, supernova, or comet. This paper will evaluate one prominent recent proposal, that the Star was a 'recurrent nova' now catalogued as DO Aquilae, and provide three refutations. In particular, (1) DO Aql is certainly not a recurrent nova, but rather an ordinary nova with a recurrence time scale of over a million years, (2) in its 1925 eruption, DO Aql certainly never got brighter than 8.5 mag, and the physics of the system proves that it could never get to the required luminosity of a supernova, and (3) the Magi were astrologers who had no recognition or interpretation for novae (or supernovae or comets) so any such event is completely irrelevant and meaningless to them.