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after being bound for a plane new Jersey fell thousands of feet without warning — sending 15 people to the hospital — A university professor has offered an unexpected possible explanation for the plane crash: cosmic rays.
JetBlue Airbus A320 According to Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert at the University of Surrey, the supernova elsewhere in the galaxy may have been hit by a stream of high-energy particles emitted from the explosion. space.com,
“Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of circuits,” Dyer said. “They can cause a simple bit flip, like a zero to one or a one to zero. They can mess up information and make things wrong. But they can also cause hardware failures, when they generate current in an electronic device and burn it out.”
The plane departed from Cancún on October 30 while returning to Newark when it fell from the skyThe pilots managed to right the plane and made an emergency landing in Tampa,
About 20 people were injured, including 15 who required hospitalization due to the excessive speed on the airplane due to the sudden fall. Some passengers suffered serious injuries, including head injuries that left them bleeding for the remainder of the flight.
Airbus officials attributed the incident to “intense solar radiation” from the Sun that was interfering with the plane’s navigation equipment.
But Dyer believes the radiation is not from our Sun, but from a star that has gone supernova. He said the radiation levels caused by local solar events on October 30 would not be high enough to cause the aircraft to malfunction, but a supernova could.
When a star explodes as a supernova, it throws protons into the universe at the speed of light. When those particles reach Earth, they can disrupt electronics, including airplanes.
Cosmic rays are always hitting Earth’s atmosphere, but most don’t have the power to cause disruption like JetBlue’s flight.
Local solar energy from our Sun can cause interference to electronics when solar flares occur. The Sun occasionally releases bursts of energy from its surface, flooding the Earth with energy.
Dyer said aircraft manufacturers need to create systems that can withstand potential cosmic interference.
“It is incumbent on manufacturers to produce robust electronics, especially in safety-critical units,” Dyer said. “The slight problem is that in 20 years, they have become complacent, because nothing like this has happened [significant solar weather] “Incidents.”
