Chinese Records of Supernovae in a.d. 1408 Revisited

This article re-examines the Chinese records of the "new star" of A.D. 1408 and evaluates different interpretations by various scholars. Li Qibin was the first to make connections between several records and suggest that these records indicated a supernova explosion. He identified it with a supernova in Cygnus. Richard Stephenson considered that these records might be of a comet or meteor. This difference in interpretation, this article argues, arises from the different criteria used in judging whether a temporary star had been a supernova or not. Further textual investigation may help to improve the judgement. We discovered two new references to this celestial event in the local histories Sichuan zongzhi and Longzhou zhi which suggest that the temporary star observed on 10 September 1408 should be a meteor as Stephenson has claimed, not the same event recorded on 24 October 1408, as Li had claimed. Nevertheless, it seems that all the evidence that we have found does not totally rule out the possibility that the object observed on 24 October might be a supernova or nova. Much ambiguity exists in the original text, making the interpretation of ancient Chinese records of celestial events still a topic of interest.