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