Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe Can cosmic rays corrupt computers?
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Feb 3, 2026 They examine how modern electronics store bits using semiconductors, capacitors, and caches. They explain cosmic rays and particle showers that can ionize silicon and possibly flip bits. They outline outcomes from harmless glitches to silent data corruption and survey protections like ECC, checksums, redundancy, and radiation hardening.
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Digital Bits Are Physical And Fragile
- Computers store bits using tiny physical states in semiconductors like silicon, often as charge on capacitors or transistor states.
- These states are fundamentally analog and require engineering (doping, bands, refresh cycles) to behave as reliable digital zeros and ones.
Cosmic Rays Constantly Shower Earth
- Cosmic rays are energetic particles from the sun, planets, supernovas and beyond that constantly strike Earth and create particle showers in the atmosphere.
- Many secondary particles (especially muons) penetrate to ground level and through everyday objects, so radiation is pervasive.
Particles Can Physically Flip Bits
- When a cosmic ray traverses silicon it can ionize or displace atoms, depositing charge or breaking insulating regions in circuits.
- That deposited charge can flip stored bits in DRAM, SRAM, or flash, causing zeros to become ones or vice versa.