Plane’s horror plunge which injured 20 passengers blamed on ‘exploding star’s cosmic rays’
An exploding star in a distant galaxy is getting the blame for a plane’s horrifying plunge that left 20 passengers injured – and these ‘cosmic rays’ could fry the kit on your next flight too
A plane that suddenly plunged thousands of feet and injured 20 people was likely struck by cosmic rays from a star in another galaxy, hurling out electronics-frying particles that could also wreck your next flight.
The JetBlue Airbus A320 flight, heading for New Jersey, was hit by high-energy particles from a distant supernova blast that travelled millions of years, according to Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert at the University of Surrey, who spoke to space.com
“Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” he said. “They can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.”
The plane was on its way from Cancun to Newark on October 30 when it just fell out of the sky in a terrifying burst of extreme turbulence, officials said.
The pilots made an emergency landing at Tampa in Florida, but about 20 passengers suffered serious injuries, including head wounds, as the plane plummeted towards the ground.
Airbus officials blamed the glitch this week on “intense solar radiation” from the sun interfering with the 20-year-old plane’s navigation computer. Dyer, however, blames cosmic rays because radiation levels were too low.
He reckons the plane was struck by particles from a dying supernova blasting out protons at the speed of light.
“They can cause a simple bit flip, like a zero to one or one to zero,” he told space.com. “They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.”
As the particles fly towards Earth, they may hit an electronic circuit inside an aircraft sensor or onboard computer, disrupting the plane’s flight.
Casey Dreier, Chief of Space Policy at The Planetary Society, told the New York Post that these cosmic rays are “everywhere” and “constantly bombard Earth”.
“We have lots and lots of airplanes flying every day, so very occasionally these things will occur,” he said.
“If a particle strikes a critical circuit in a computer, it can corrupt the computer’s memory, sensor data, or potentially cause other damage.”
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