After an airplane bound for New Jersey fell thousands of feet without warning — sending 15 people to the hospital — a university professor has given an unexpected possible explanation for the aircraft’s mishap: cosmic rays.
The JetBlue Airbus A320 may have been hit by a stream of high-energy particles emanating from a supernova explosion elsewhere in the galaxy, according to Clive Dyer, a University of Surrey space and radiation expert who spoke to Space.com.
“Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer said. “They can cause a simple bit flip, like a zero to one or one to zero. 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.”
The aircraft departed from Cancun on its way back to Newark on October 30 when it plunged from the sky. The pilots managed to right the plane and made an emergency landing in Tampa.
The extreme motion on the airplane caused by the sudden drop injured approximately 20 people, including 15 who needed hospitalization. Some passengers suffered serious injuries, including head wounds that left them bloody for the remainder of the flight.
Airbus officials blamed the incident on “intense solar radiation” from the sun that was interfering with the plane’s navigation equipment.
But Dyer thinks the radiation is not from our sun, but rather a star that went supernova. He said the levels of radiation caused by local solar events on October 30 wouldn’t have been enough to cause the plane to malfunction, but a supernova could.
When a star explodes in a supernova, it tosses protons across the universe at the speed of light. When those particles reach Earth, they can disrupt electronics, including those on board airplanes.
Cosmic rays are always smashing into Earth’s atmosphere, but most don’t have the power to cause disruptions like the one that dropped the JetBlue flight.
Local solar energy from our sun can cause disruptions to electronics when solar flares occur. The sun occasionally throws off bursts of energy from its surface, pelting the Earth with energy.
Dyer said that aircraft manufacturers need to build systems that can withstand potential cosmic interference.
“It’s down to manufacturers to produce hardy electronics, especially in safety critical units,” Dyer said. “A slight problem is that over 20 years, they’ve become complacent, because there have not been any [significant solar weather] events.”
