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That energy can't propagate faster than the object adding energy to the acoustic field, with the result that you get a bunching up of a great deal of acoustic energy in a narrow wavefront. In contrast, an aeroplane flying at the speed of sound is constantly adding energy to the propagating wave through drag mechanisms. There is nothing "adding to" the sound - or light - wave as it travels. This is because the sound wave, like a light wave in the EM field, is simply the propagation of a fixed amount of energy. However, there is one likeness that I don't think has been noticed yet and that is the following: a sound wave travelling at the speed of sound does not make a sonic boom! There are many differences between light and sound waves noted in other answers, such as the impossibility of any object with nonzero rest mass reaching lightspeed. These fields do not interact with air enough to compress them and produce sounds. Light is an electromagnetic wave that propagates also in vacuum modifying electric and magnetic fields. The sound source will passīy a stationary observer before the observer hears the sound it Since the source is moving faster than the sound waves it creates, it leads the advancing wavefront. sound source traveling at 1.4 times the speed of sound (Machġ.4).
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The sonic boom is, as you rightly say, sound produced by compression of air molecules by an object, and is also propagating through the air. Sound " is a vibration that propagates as a typically audible mechanical wave of pressure and displacement, through a medium such as air or water" and must propagate itself by compressing particles (atoms/ molecules). The answer is already in your own question: just because light is not an object. More than the speed of sound] doesn't produce a sonic boom right? Why? Light which travels at 300000000m/s [much I know that when an object exceeds the speed of sound aĪsonic boom is produced. But it doesn't work like that if you hit the air on a whole front at faster than the speed of sound: in this case, the forward momentum you impart is larger than the usual thermal movement, and you get supersonic behaviour. Therefore a slow-moving object, or a sufficiently small object (like an alpha particle) only causes normal sound waves. This extra momentum information is carried on not so much by the sound-wave movement, but by the random thermal movements – in a “smooth” way. On this microscopic level, sound propagation is basically a “chain of messengers”: one molecule gets knocked to be slightly faster or slower than usual. The molecules have a lot of thermal movement – the average speed is in the same order of magnitude as the speed of sound. And in particular, it doesn't happen simultaneously along a whole front, so there's no reason a shock wave would build up.ġ Another way to look at this is if you consider the gas on a molecular level. This gives it a slight “knock” but nothing dramatic. When there is an interaction, it pretty much means just a single air molecule is hit by a photon. Now, with small particles like light, this issue doesn't arise, because the air doesn't need to get out of the way in the first place: at least visible photons don't interact with air much at all, so they simply “fly past”. Instead, the air has to create a sharp shock wave then, which is two-dimensional and therefore can be heard much further. At 25 C, the speed of sound is 1,246 kilometres per hour.A sonic boom is produced when a macroscopic object (say, roughly: larger than the average spacing between air molecules, $\approx 3\,\mathrm$) moves so fast that the air has no time to “get out of its way” in the usual way (linearly responding 1 to a pressure buildup, which creates a normal sound wave that disperses rather quickly, more or less uniform in all directions). At which temperature will sound travel faster?ĭoes air temperature affect the speed of sound? Kim Strong, a professor of physics at the University of Toronto says the answer is yes, in fact sound travels faster when the air is hotter. Sometimes a wave encounters the end of a medium and the presence of a different medium. The faster wave travels a greater distance in the same amount of time. What happens if you increase the speed of a wave? If v w changes and f remains the same, then the wavelength λ must change. However, the frequency usually remains the same because it is like a driven oscillation and has the frequency of the original source. The speed of sound can change when sound travels from one medium to another.
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Now, we have got the complete detailed explanation and answer for everyone, who is interested! This is a question our experts keep getting from time to time. Would increase the speed of a sound wave?