Science File -

Commentators have since tended to latch on to the Mark passage and assume that the magi's offering was a prophetic foreshadowing: 

The golden tribute owns Him King,

But frankincense to God they bring,

And last, prophetic sign, with myrrh,

They shadow forth His sepulcher.

(Aurelius Prudentius (348-413:O Sola Magnarum Urbium tr. anon)

 (The famous carol We Three Kings Of Orient Are, by John Henry Hopkins, dates no further back than 1857)

 Oh, and people have been trying for 2,000 years to identify the star that led them. Not only has none of the candidates ever checked out, the behaviour (going before them, keeping in sight, then hovering over the precise address where the baby lay) is not behaviour normally indulged in by stars or any other heavenly body for that matter, including supernovas. Some astral phenomenon is evidently being invoked; it was a common belief that the occurrence of shooting stars (comets and meteorites) presaged important events, but what itcould have been, is lost in time. "Lights in the sky" leading one on, may have recalled, to Jewish readers, the Pillar of Fire by Night that helped guide the Israelites in the Wilderness (Exodus 13,21-22), but pagans also had the same legends; when at the fall of Troy, Anchises asks Jupiter for a sign that his family will survive, Jupiter sends thunder and de caelo lapsa per umbras stella facem ducens multa cum luce cucurrit: a comet with a long fiery tail (Virgil: Aeneid II, 693-4)

 Having made their presentation, the Magi leave for home, cunningly avoiding Herod on the way. This must have been a kind of pilgrimage or haj to them, because the journey and the sight of the Christ appears to have been sufficient in themselves; the magi are not portrayed as doing or saying anything else. Nor do we find out what happened to the gifts. Legends aplenty remain as to what happened to men and treasures afterwards - if they ever existed.