Does your computer crash every now and then? Smartphone freezes? Dont blame the manufacturers, as the culprit is the cosmic rays from space.
It is the effect of electrically charged particles produced by cosmic rays, whose origin lies outside of our solar system causing hang-ups in our devices according to scientists.
Bharat Bhuva, a professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University said, This is a really big problem, but it is mostly invisible to the public.
When cosmic rays begin travelling at fractions of the speed of light and strike the earths atmosphere, they produce a high surge of secondary particles, inclusive of energetic neutrons, muons, pions and alpha particles.
Millions of these particles even strike your physical body each moment, but this subatomic stream is indiscernible and has no damaging effects on living beings.
Albeit even a fraction of these particles carry with them enough energy, to interfere with the working of electronic circuitry.
Since it is difficult to know when and where these particles will strike and they do not do any physical damage, the malfunctions they cause are very difficult to characterize.
When you have a single bit flip, it could have any number of causes. It could be a software bug or a hardware flaw, for example. The only way you can determine that it is a single-event upset is by eliminating all the other possible causes, Bhuva says.
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