The Great Christ Comet (59 page)

Therefore when we read of a major meteor storm in Revelation 12:4, we should give a thought to where the parent comet is.

Sometimes meteor storms may be due to the parent comet fragmenting in whole or in part—in the case of the Andromedid meteor storms of 1872 and 1885, Comet 3D/Biela's complete disintegration over a decade beginning in 1842–1843.
12

Meteor storms are not only rare, but they also tend to be short-lived—they endure for at most a few hours, sometimes no more than a quarter of an hour. They “spawn from very narrow streams of densely packed particles, perhaps only 25,000 to 75,000 km wide—or only a few to several times the diameter of Earth.”
13

And then we must consider that only a narrow slice of the world's population is in a position to observe the phenomenon, and only if weather conditions are favorable.
14
Modern meteor storm hunters, even with all of their technological sophistication, would be the first to emphasize that seeing one is remarkably fortuitous. That one radiated from Hydra's tail, right next to Virgo, on the eve of the birth of her cometary baby is astonishing. Although observers would have had no idea what caused meteor storms, they would have been aware of how rare they were, and they must have been deeply impressed that one occurred right at that very time.

As we shall see, the meteoroid stream responsible for the 6 BC meteor storm was direct or prograde (i.e., it orbited in a counterclockwise direction), unlike the Christ Comet, which was retrograde (orbiting in a clockwise direction). The meteoroid stream responsible was passing from the south to the north of the ecliptic plane (i.e., it was crossing its ascending node) at the time when the meteor storm occurred.

Astronomically speaking, the sign in Revelation 12:3–4a is entirely unrelated to the Christ Comet. Yet the cometary apparition and meteor storm worked together in harmony as two distinct actors with different main parts in a single, great unfolding celestial play marking the nativity of the Messiah.

Is there any way to match the meteor storm described in Revelation with a modern meteor shower or meteoroid stream or with a particular comet? It is not necessarily a hopeless venture. It is theoretically possible that the meteoroid stream that gave rise to the meteor storm still exists and that it still delivers, or will in the future deliver, meteors on an annual or sporadic basis. We know approximately when this meteor storm of 6 BC occurred and roughly where it radiated from, and so we are in a position to determine the range of orbital possibilities for the meteoroid stream responsible. By comparing the possible orbits of the Hydrid meteoroid stream to the known orbits of meteoroid streams and comets (and asteroids), we might conceivably be able to find a match. Needless to say, the implications of two millennia of gravitational effects on the evolution of orbits would have to be taken into account. We would also need to allow for the impact of precession of the equinoxes, the 26,000-year cycle due to the wobble of Earth on its axis. It would, of course, be wonderful if we could identify the meteoroid stream or comet responsible for the meteor storm of 6 BC. However, we do well to remember what Pete Bias has written:

Most meteor showers are short-lived and many are unpredictable. The same gravitational processes that occasionally pull meteor streams into the Earth's orbit also pull them away. Moreover, because of the continual dispersion of meteoroids away from a parent comet's orbit (by a combination of planetary perturbations, unique initial ejection
conditions for each meteoroid, Poynting-Robertson effects, and others), even old faithful streams like the Perseids eventually disperse unless new meteoroids are continually added. Meteor showers must, perforce, be finite.
15

It is worth recalling what exactly a meteor is. It is essentially a small “pebble” of space dust that collides with Earth's atmosphere. The collision begins some 130–150 km up in the atmosphere. The friction the meteoroid experiences causes it to become superheated and bright and to lose some of its mass. This dispelled material forms a vapor cloud around the remaining core of the meteoroid, and it too begins to disintegrate as it impacts the atmosphere. Thus there is “an ever expanding, ever disintegrating nebulous mass of dust and superheated vapor that is thrown back and away from the main particle as it is continually, violently slowed by the collisions with the atmosphere.”
16
Most meteoroids have fully disintegrated by the time they are about 75 km above the surface of Earth.
17
To human observers, what happens high in the atmosphere manifests as a bright light streaking across the heavens for a brief moment.

Especially bright meteors, caused by larger pieces of comet debris striking Earth's atmosphere, are called fireballs. They are brighter than all the stars and at least as bright as the planets Jupiter or Venus (approximately magnitude -2 to -5 respectively). Sometimes they are as bright as, or even brighter than, the full Moon. Fireballs that attain to a magnitude of -14 or greater are called bolides; those that reach -17 or greater, like the Chelyabinsk meteor of February 15, 2013 (see
fig. 14.7
), are called superbolides.
18

Meteoroids responsible for fireballs that are very bright (over -8 in apparent magnitude)
sometimes survive the passage through the atmosphere and make it to the ground as meteorites (Acts 19:35 mentions a “sacred stone that fell from the sky”). Often fireballs remain visible for several seconds. Some very bright fireballs, bolides, and superbolides are visible for many seconds. In their wake they may leave trails that can last for quite a few minutes or, in rare cases such as the Chelyabinsk meteor, for up to 9 hours.

Concentrated numbers of fireballs are associated with particular heavy meteor showers or storms. On November 17, 1998, Earth passed through a broad section of a Leonid meteoroid stream, with the result that there was “a glorious rain of fireballs” across the world.
19
The reason for the dense concentration of larger meteoroids that gives rise to such “fireball showers” is almost certainly that the parent comet underwent some kind of fragmentation or splitting event at the time that it deposited these meteoroids, whether recently or hundreds or even thousands of years earlier. In the case of the 1998 Leonid “storm,” the meteoroids were deposited by Comet Tempel-Tuttle during its 1333 return.
20
Bias reports that for 2½ hours he “was dazzled by the most beautiful shower of fireballs that I'll ever hope to see. Fireballs of -3 magnitude or brighter were being seen almost every other minute! All were terrifically bright and impressive. . . . Several lit up the entire backyard. One evidently was so bright that it lit up the southern horizon like a reddish false dawn despite the fact that the meteor was below my horizon.”
21

Jenniskens comments that “The biggest Leonid fireballs associated with the 1998 Filament had a magnitude of [about] -14.5 [magnitude],”
22
which is brighter than the full Moon.

The meteor storm described by Revelation 12 gave the impression that a third of the visible stars in the dome of the sky at the time were pulled and thrown toward Earth by Hydra's tail. It seems that the tail of Hydra has always tended to be understood as ending at
π
(Pi) Hydrae. As for how far up Hydra's body the tail extends, we gather from Pseudo-Eratosthenes (
Catasterismi
41) that Corvus/the Raven was regarded as being perched on the tail.
π
(Pi) Hydrae and
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae together form a distinctive last part of the tail, which is essentially parallel to the ecliptic.
23
From
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae upwards, the tail curves sharply and heads toward the south. It was on this stretch, between
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae and the coil associated with
β
,
ο
, and
ξ
Hydrae, that Corvus/the Raven rested and the tail commenced (
fig. 14.8
).

The star
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae rose approximately 54 minutes before
π
(Pi) Hydrae. If
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae was the radiant of the meteors, then, the meteor storm would have had to occur during that 54-minute period. If the radiant was at, say, HIP59373 (the part of Hydra on which Corvus/the Raven perched), then the meteor storm would have had to have taken place within the 1 hour and 44 minutes between its rising and
π
(Pi) Hydrae's rising. It was a moonless sky.

The meteor display in Hydra is probably responsible for the peculiar appearance of Hydra, as described in Revelation 12:3—the constellation figure's fiery appearance, its seven crowns, and its ten horns. Notably the author of Revelation counts this description of Hydra's appearance as an integral part of the second extraordinary sign in heaven (vv. 3–4). At the time of the meteor storm, Hydra would have stretched upwards just over a third of the way from the eastern (ESE/SE) horizon to the western (W/WSW). That is striking, because Revelation 12:3 states that one-third of the stars in the dome of the sky seemed to be thrown to the earth. That would seem to mean that no meteor streak commenced beyond that point, although many meteors presumably extended beyond it.

To discover the orbit of the meteoroid stream responsible for the meteor storm radiating from a point between
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae and HIP59373, in the relevant window of time, from the Near East, I approached David Asher of the Armagh Observatory.

Nailing down an orbit for an ancient meteoroid stream is no easy business—calculations must take into account the rate of Earth's rotation, precession of the equinoxes, and many other factors. Plus, it is unclear from Revelation 12:3–4 what the velocity of the meteors was.

Meteor storms are typically related to short-period comets, either Jupiter-family comets (orbital period: 3–20 years) or Halley-type comets (orbital period: 20–200 years). However, long-period comets with orbital periods up to 10,000 years can give rise to meteor outbursts, and cometary asteroids might also conceivably give rise to meteor storms.

David Asher worked out a range of possible orbits for the meteoroid stream that caused the 6 BC Hydrid meteor storm.
24
Any of the orbits in
table 14.1
could theoretically have caused a meteor storm at the relevant time, radiating from
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae.