> Bit flips from cosmic rays.
I don't think that's it. IIRC, if a geomagnetic storm/coronal mass ejection is big enough, it can cause certain effects that are similar to an EMP. What the OP is talking about sounds like a distorted version of that danger: a nuclear EMP could directly fry microelectronics, a solar storm is a kind of EMP (solar EMP), but is missing most of the effects that could directly damage microelectronics, and many people conflate the two.
I've had a computer blow out (sparks, smoke and everything) due to a power surge when the main power went out and then back on, rapidly.
So while the "direct" causes might be different between EMP and CME, the end results are basically the same. I could only imagine what our current (very power sensitive) electronics would do in that scenario.
From the wikipedia Carrington Event you posted:
> Because of the geomagnetically induced current from the electromagnetic field, telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases giving their operators electric shocks.[22] Telegraph pylons threw sparks.
> So while the "direct" causes might be different between EMP and CME, the end results are basically the same.
Not necessarily. My understanding is a CME solar EMP would take out grid-connected devices (via power surges over the grid), but leave most unconnected devices unharmed (e.g. laptops running on battery), but a nuclear EMP would take out both.
Hot pixels are when the CCD (camera sensor) achieves its max level and becomes bright. Pixel overloaded (should also result in spillover).
Difference is really just what part of the system receives the energy. For example, you can overload a pixel with a laser, but you also should get spillover. Bit flips tend to be more localized, affecting only one part. In reality, the difference doesn't matter too much, as long as we're keeping our discussion to cosmic events. But also note that images experience a lot of (non-gaussian) noise and plenty of this is from cosmic excitation as well as from other natural and man made sources. Just the levels are a lot lower and unlikely to result in a bitflip (which is a pretty high energy event).
Instead, what's happening in GGP's experiment is that actual electrons, created in the bulk of the active silicon region by a passing cosmic ray, are getting detected by the CCD, and it will (correctly) read out some value between 00000 and 11111, depending on how many electrons it saw. In principle you can actually make a histogram of these readout values and observe the Bethe-Bloch distribution of energy loss for ionizing particles through the (very thin) bulk of silicon! On the other hand, random bit flips (which are much rarer!) would just give you a random distribution of the numbers {00000, 00001, 00010, 00100, 01000, 10000}.
So the radio would fail to connect to many bluetooth devices at the time (because Bosch), the application had no way of telling what state the radio (that it was meant to speak to) was in (because of the faulty protocol), and the application was riddled with other bugs (because lowest-bidder contractors), but by god it was safe from lightning and cosmic rays (except not really because they could just as easily alter the program as the state the program was operating on).
The story goes that Mario 64 speedrunner accidentally triggered a glitch which was thought to require that a particular value is "true" (Mario is touching a ceiling) which was not in this case. The following glitch hunt had many people concluding that the most likely thing that happened was a bit-flip via cosmic radiation which caused the exact distance change which could have otherwise been caused by a different but similar glitch.