Thanks to
Time's science writer
Michael Lemonick for spotting
The Ancient Space Storm That Struck the Earth...
"Sometime between the spring of 774 A.D and the summer of 775, a cataclysmic event happened somewhere out in the cosmos -- and we felt it here, as a spike of radioactive carbon-14 and beryllium-10. The isotopes were taken up by growing Japanese cedar trees and there they remained."
A Japanese team revealed the anomalous 20-times-normal concentrations last year in a
Nature piece,
A signature of cosmic-ray increase in ad 774–775 from tree rings in Japan...
...and now another team offers an explanation,
A Galactic short gamma-ray burst as cause for the 14C peak in AD 774/5.
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