Having a computer that keeps crashing is a frustrating problem, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with your device.
As it turns out, some of these crashes are caused by electrically charged particles from cosmic rays that pass through the Earth's atmosphere and interfere with devices' circuitry in single-event upsets.
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, professor of electrical engineering and member of Vanderbilt University's Radiation Effect Research Group Bharat Bhuva gave a presentation on the worsening problem of SEUs.
In the presentation, Bhuva described how these electrically charged particles from cosmic rays can cause low-grade havoc on devices such as laptops, smartphones, and other personal electronic devices.
The Problem With SEUs
Unless you're an astronaut floating in space, it is unlikely that this by-product of cosmic rays will cause any serious harm to your body. However, electronic devices aren't so lucky.
Even just a fraction of secondary particles including energetic neutrons, pions, muons and alpha particles have enough energy to interfere and wreak havoc on your device. In the event of an SEU, these particles interfere with your device's integrated circuitry and alter bits of the stored data from a single pixel in a photo and even cause a complete device crash.
It may seem like a trivial problem to individuals with longer patience with their devices, but with the world getting more and more reliant on these devices, Bhuva believes that it will only continue to get worse.
What's more, the difficulty lies in detecting the problem as they are very difficult to predict and can only be determined if all other possible causes have been eliminated.
To illustrate the possible damages that can arise from SEUs, Bhuva described an event in Belgium when an SEU added more than 4,000 votes to a candidate in an electronic voting machine bit flip in 2003. In another event in 2008, a passenger jet flying to Perth appeared to be affected by an SEU that caused the autopilot to disengage, making the plane dive 690 feet in just 23 seconds.
What Are Cosmic Rays?
Cosmic rays are high-speed atomic nuclei with energy at almost the speed of light and are produced by a variety of events in space such as supernova explosions. Cosmic rays originating from our solar system generally come from explosive events from our sun and have commonly low energy, while galactic cosmic rays are seen to be powered by black holes at the center of other galaxies or generated by shock waves coming from supernova explosions such as the Crab Nebula cluster.
Though the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field usually shield humans from cosmic rays, unprotected astronauts beyond the planet's magnetic field are exposed to serious danger as these rays can break apart molecules in living cells.
