Matthews posits that the heavenly light which guided the Magi to the infant Jesus inside the cave in Bethlehem was neither a comet nor a planetary conjunction, but was most likely a supernova or just a nova. Since no sign of the remnant of a 2000-year-old supernova has been found to date, the more likely candidate was a nova because it better fits the basic Gospel accounts and is recorded in the Chinese and Korean astronomical archives to have occurred in mid-March 5 BC.

This is the year-month, in fact, that is currently conceded by most Catholic biblical scholars to be the approximate birth date of Jesus as can be gleaned from the infancy narratives in the Bible and several historico-scientific clues. The discrepancy in year was due to the Christian monk Dionysius Exiguus, chronologist and scholar, who in the year 525 devised the current system of reckoning the Christian era, but erroneously set AD 1 on what should have really been five years earlier. On the other hand, the shift from mid-March to December 25 in the 4th century was Rome’s move to convert, rather than to absorb, the pagan celebration of Sol Invictus into a Christian feast and this is well known to knowledgeable Catholics.

So the fact that the Star of Bethlehem was most probably a nova instead of a supernova, and not a light from a mother space ship of the supposedly extra-terrestrial alien, Jesus Christ, as some wacky conspiracy theorists would have us believe, leads us to ask some questions on what novas and supernovas are and what makes them burst into sudden brilliance. The technical answers had their start and also their later refinements from physics Nobelist and remarkable nonagenarian achiever Hans Bethe, of whom we will have more admirable facts to say later.

For our pedestrian purpose, we may just describe a nova as a variable star that suddenly increases in brightness from thousands to hundreds of thousands of times, whereas a supernova is an extremely bright nova that increases up to billions of times in brightness. A practical distinction between the two is that a nova’ s brightness can recur, but a supernova’s display of unbelievably intensified brilliance is just a one-time phenomenon. The technical details of what makes our own sun and other stars involve intricate nuclear physics and the pioneer here was Hans Bethe (pronounced BAY tuh), the last titan of 20th century physics, a central figure in the birth of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, a physics Nobelist and a man of admirable humility.

Born on July 26, 1906 in Strasbourg, now in France but at the time a part of Germany, Hans Albretch Bethe showed early genius as a mathematician and he studied physics at the University of Frankfurt, doing research at the University of Munich and got his doctorate in 1928. After receiving fellowships from 1930-31 to the University of Cambridge and then the Institute of Physics in Rome, where he worked with Enrico Fermi, he became an assistant to theoretical physicists Paul Ewald at University of Stuttgart, who would become his father-in-law a decade later when Bethe married Rose Ewald who graduated from Cornell.

Although Bethe’s father was a professor of physiology and a protestant, his mother was Jewish and Hitler’s persecution of Jews led to his being dismissed from his post at the University of Tubingen. He finally went to Cornell in 1935 in Ithaca, NY, which he regarded as his home for the next 70 years. Bethe propelled Cornell’s physics department into the top rank and it was there that he wrote his famous reviews of nuclear physics and the his seminal paper on the theory of energy production in stars, a paper that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967.

But what was most remarkable about Bethe was that until his death on March 7, 2005, he was still intellectually active. After his retirement in 1975, he turned to astrophysics and in 1979 he collaborated with astrophysicist Brown on paper that toppled the long-held assumptions about the density of the core of a collapsing star. And later, at the age of 83, he apprenticed himself to Gerald E. Brown of the State University of New York at Stony Brook to learn lattice gauge theory one of the most challenging areas in all of physics. Which universally admired doyen of physics would have the humility to admit apprenticeship to a younger person?

At the zenith of his accomplishments, his mind was a wonder to behold. He could not program the simplest computer, but had no trouble digesting reams of supercomputer readouts. For help, he relied on his a slide rule he had carried around for 70 years.

A BLESSED AND PROPEROUS NEW YEAR TO ALL!