6 Incredible Ancient Legends That Are Inspired by Real Historic Events

3. The Guest Star

In the year 1006, astronomers around the world spotted what they called a “guest star” in the sky. A Persian scholar named Ibn Sina gave a very detailed account of the event. In Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing), Sina described how the “guest star” kept changing colors. He also added that the object in the sky threw sparks before finally disappearing.

For years, the “guest star” was believed to be a comet, but we now know, through science, that it was actually a supernova that took place 7,200 years ago and whose visible light only reached the Earth at the turn of the first millennium. The color changes mentioned by Sina may have been because of the merger of two white dwarfs, which would create a powerful supernova bursting with color.