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Radiation Damage to the HST Has Been Several Years Out of Phase With the Solar Cycle

posted by hubie on Monday August 24, @03:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the Space dept.
Hardware

VLM writes:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18214

Here's a strange, light space story. Obviously, everyone knows ionizing radiation damages silicon. Anyone have good stories from the old days of marginal ram detecting cosmic rays? That meme seemed to die out around the dram kilo to mega transition, certainly forgotten by giga sized dram, which you'd think would be more severely impacted from being smaller... Anyway, surprisingly, a data analysis comparing known HST silicon damage to known solar radiation levels shows it's out of phase by some years.

1) Is it new physics? Either the radiation or silicon damage?

2) Is it P-Hacking in STEM where it's just numerology, abuse R and numpy.py until you get clickbait? The authors admit "We obtain remarkably accurate fits to Hubble data but with physically absurd parameter values."

3) Some of both or maybe none of either? Some other cause?

Any fun P-hacking stories from the world of STEM?

Just a fun light news story, but there's also some depth to think about.

Original Submission


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24, @04:32AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 24, @04:32AM (#1452159)

    I've heard that the malfunctions attributed to cosmic rays on earth-bound electronics are more commonly caused by the decay of trace radionuclides like uranium and thorium that are present in the materials of the electronics. Things are obviously very different when your semiconductors are in space though.

  • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday August 24, @08:06AM

    by shrewdsheep (5215) on Monday August 24, @08:06AM (#1452167) Journal

    We obtain remarkably accurate fits to Hubble data but with physically absurd parameter values.

    Such findings smell of overfitting. Using a proper hold-out set or using other techniques like cross-validation or bootstrapping can prevent this. Didn't read TFA whether it took this properly into account.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Username on Monday August 24, @01:43PM

    by Username (4557) on Monday August 24, @01:43PM (#1452183)

    >analysis comparing known HST silicon damage to known solar radiation levels shows it's out of phase by some years.

    So Hawaii Standard Time is based on a sundial with lunar phase adjustments?

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