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NJ-bound plane that suddenly plunged thousands of feet likely hit by ‘cosmic rays’ from a whole other galaxy
ByNatalie O'Neill
Published Dec. 4, 2025, 6:16 p.m. ET
421 Comments
Star wars!
A New Jersey-bound airplane that suddenly plunged thousands of feet in the air — sending 15 people to the hospital in October — was likely struck by cosmic rays from a star that exploded in another galaxy, according to space experts.
The JetBlue Airbus A320 flight was hit by a stream of high-energy particles from a distant supernova blast that traveled millions of years, according to Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert from the University of Surrey who spoke to space.com
“Cosmic rays can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer told the outlet.
“They can cause a simple bit flip, like a zero to one or one to zero. 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 out.”
The flight was headed from Cancun to Newark on Oct. 30, when it fell out of the sky for no apparent reason in a frightening bout of extreme turbulence, officials said at the time.
Pilots regained control and made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, but roughly 20 passengers suffered serious injuries, including bloody head wounds.
Airbus officials blamed the glitch this week on “intense solar radiation” from the sun interfering with the 20-year-old plane’s navigation computer.
But Dyer, who has studied effects of solar radiation on aircraft electronics for decades, said the radiation levels were not strong enough to impact the flight — and noted it was likely due to a supernova.
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Cosmic rays are created when massive stars explode in supernovas at the end of their lives, hurling protons across the universe at the speed of light.
As the particles fly towards Earth, they may hit an electronic circuit inside an aircraft sensor or onboard computer, disrupting the plane’s flight.
NJ-bound plane that suddenly plunged thousands of feet likely hit by ‘cosmic rays’ from a whole other galaxy
The JetBlue flight was headed from Cancun to Newark on Oct. 30, when it fell out of the sky for no apparent reason in a frightening bout of extreme turbulence,
nypost.com
