We’ve all heard about cosmic rays flipping bits here and there, but by and large, it occurs rarely enough that we don’t worry too much about it on a day-to-day basis. However, it seems just ...

It's also a "wrong place at the wrong time" kind of thing, in which the chances of cosmic rays flipping the bits in our electronics is sparse and random. And so far, few major catastrophes can be ...

Although it's hard to determine exactly what caused a given bit flip, cosmic rays were suspected in both incidents. "When you have a single bit flip, it could have any number of causes," says Bhuva.

or sometimes multiple bit errors that happen, and can affect what domain your software is looking up – Artem Dinaburg How cosmic rays flip bits Single event upsets (SEUs) occur in computer ...

However, given the isolated nature of the incident and the audit of the source code, there are very few reasonable conclusions that don't involve a bit-flip caused by a cosmic ray. To understand ...

More information: Luca Comisso et al, Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays Accelerated by Magnetically Dominated Turbulence, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2024). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad955f ...

A bit flip isn't something that is itself visible ... "I lean towards hardware malfunction" – rather than cosmic rays as the culprit. In certain scenarios, there's enough data to indicate ...