> Our results, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, rule out “solar superflares” as the culprit – but the true cause remains unknown. > For m

> Our results, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, rule out “solar superflares” as the culprit – but the true cause remains unknown. > For my money, the Sun is still the most likely culprit for Miyake events. At first the two statements above had me perplexed. They seem to contradict each other. Further reading suggests that the author(s) believe the solar superflares would have been visible, yet were not recorded in historical accounts, and so a "solar superflare" could not be the culprit, but it could be a different solar phenomenon. From the source paper (linked in the article) we have these statements: > These ‘Miyake events’ are likely produced by rare increases in cosmic radiation from the Sun or other energetic astrophysical sources. >The wide consensus of the literature is that these events have a solar origin, beginning with Melott & Thomas [43]; Usoskin et al. [44]. For example, the events could represent a solar magnetic collapse, a very brief grand solar minimum, with the reduced heliospheric shielding exposing the Earth to an increase in Galactic cosmic rays > Alternatively, and more popular in the literature, the Miyake events could represent the extreme tail of a distribution of solar flares continuous with those that are observed astrophysically on the modern Sun and other solar-like stars. > Unfortunately, there is fairly limited evidence in written historical accounts for unusual astronomical phenomena coinciding with the radiocarbon spikes. What is the difference between "wide consensus" and "more popular" in the literature?