The computer errors from outer space

The computer errors from outer space Nasa Satellites orbiting the Earth, including the International Space Station, are particularly vulnerable to space weather The Earth is subjected to a hail of subatomic particles from the Sun and beyond our solar system which could be the cause of glitches that afflict our phones and computers. And for Moe, the prime suspect that she says most likely sparked this unsettling episode was a cosmic ray from outer space: a chain of subatomic particles slamming into one another in the Earth's atmosphere, like balls colliding on a snooker table, with one eventually careering into her pacemaker's built-in computer mid-flight. Inside the pacemaker's computer memory, data is stored in the form of bits – often referred to as "ones and zeroes". In a lot of the world's computers, there are single bit errors, 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 occur in computer circuits when high-energy particles such as neutrons or muons from cosmic rays or gamma-rays strike the silicon used in microchips. Don Despain/Alamy Cosmic Ray detectors are being used in an attempt to help predict when space weather might pose a particular threat Daniel Whiteson, also at the University of California, Irvine, agrees, adding that such an incident could potentially be "catastrophic" and that our understanding of the physics inside the Sun is not well-developed enough to allow us to be able to predict major solar ejections well in advance.