C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy), also known as the Great Christmas Comet of 2011, is a long-period Kreutz sungrazing comet discovered by Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy on 27 November 2011. It made headlines by surviving a close encounter with the Sun on 16 December 2011, passing just 140,000 km above the solar surface at a speed of 536 km/s. Despite extreme temperatures in the corona, it emerged intact, becoming the brightest sungrazing comet observed by SOHO and visible to the naked eye during the Christmas holiday. It reached an apparent magnitude of –4.0, comparable to Venus, and was dubbed the Great Comet of 2011. Its nucleus is estimated to have been at least 500 meters in diameter, and it may return to perihelion around 2633 after an orbital period of about 622 years.
This comet might be the star with the tail depicted in the ancient mosaics of the Pleiades denoting Christ.
There is a lot of religion - star theory which takes it further than saying that the stars above and the earth below is aligned but actually much of the religious stories are of the Stars and happenings in the sky. The search for the bright star in the story of the Magi may just was well have been a comment and they death of three days maybe the sun dipping below the horizon on the solstice and then rising again back up. You can find some brilliant discussions of how many texts we assume are things happening on Earth are really things happening in the sky. And apparently in the early days of the church the cross didn't mean to refer to something in the sky if you look at the Pleiades it does look like a cross. A comet inside the Pleiades would have been a specific event to explain.
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