When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.A JetBlue Airbus A320 plunged into free fall in late October possibly because of a cosmic ray strike. | Credit: SOPA Images/Getty ImagesA stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova explosion may have caused a packed passenger jet to suddenly lose altitude in late October, forcing an emergency landing.The incident took place on Oct. 30 and involved a JetBlue Airbus A320 aircraft heading from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark in New Jersey. According to available reports, the aircraft suddenly dropped down in the air without an obvious reason while cruising above Florida. Although the pilots quickly regained control of the plane, at least 15 passengers were injured in the incident, forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Tampa International Airport. Earlier this week, Airbus issued a statement attributing the incident to “intense solar radiation” which may have corrupted “data critical to the functioning of flight controls.” The manufacturer subsequently grounded 6,000 A320s to roll out software updates to fix the vulnerability.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementBut there is a catch: Solar radiation levels on Oct. 30 were unremarkable and nowhere near levels that could affect aircraft electronics, Clive Dyer, a space weather and radiation expert at University of Surrey in the U.K., told Space.com. Instead, Dyer, who has studied effects of solar radiation on aircraft electronics for decades, thinks the onboard computer of the affected jet could have been struck by a cosmic ray, a stream of high-energy particles from a distant star explosion that may have travelled millions of years before reaching Earth. “[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 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. 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 o …
