The Chinese comet observation in AD 773 January
Jesse Chapman, Mark Csikszentmihalyi (U Berkeley), Ralph Neuhaeuser (U, Jena)

TL;DR
This paper critically examines the Chinese comet observation in AD 773, challenging previous claims linking it to a 14C increase and clarifying historical records and translations.
Contribution
It corrects misinterpretations of Chinese historical texts and refutes the claim that the comet collision caused the 14C increase in AD 774/5.
Findings
The Chinese observed a comet with a long tail, not a collision.
No evidence of dust rain or impact was found in original sources.
Historical records do not support a link between the comet and 14C increase.
Abstract
The strong 14C increase in the year AD 774/5 detected in one German and two Japanese trees was recently suggested to have been caused by an impact of a comet onto Earth and a deposition of large amounts of 14C into the atmosphere (Liu et al. 2014). The authors supported their claim using a report of a historic Chinese observation of a comet ostensibly colliding with Earth's atmosphere in AD 773 January. We show here that the Chinese text presented by those authors is not an original historic text, but that it is comprised of several different sources. Moreover, the translation presented in Liu et al. is misleading and inaccurate. We give the exact Chinese wordings and our English translations. According to the original sources, the Chinese observed a comet in mid January 773, but they report neither a collision nor a large coma, just a long tail. Also, there is no report in any of the…
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