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.” https://www.aol.com/articles/nj-bound-plane-suddenly-plunged-231623961.html