In the metaphorical grid of balls and springs, stiffer springs will snap back faster, leading to faster wave propagation. With the compression-wave nature of sound in mind, it should make sense that stiffer materials propagate sound at higher speeds. In a similar way, standard sound is just a compression wave traveling through the atoms and bonds in a material. This process repeats in domino fashion and you get a compression wave traveling though the grid of balls. In the process, however, the neighboring balls get pushed, causing the springs connecting them and their neighbors to compress. But the compressed springs bounce back, replacing the balls to their original position. When you push on a few balls in the grid, they move closer to their neighbors on one side and the springs connecting the balls and their neighbors compress. You can think of a material as a grid of heavy balls (representing the atoms) connected by springs (representing the bonds between the atoms). Fundamentally, standard sound is a compression wave traveling though a material. The speed of sound in air under typical conditions is about 343 meters per second, while the speed of sound in water is about 1,480 meters per second. Sound travels faster in water than in air. Therein lies the challenge in supersonic flight: building an aircraft that is fast and sturdy enough to withstand such shaking.Sound travels so well underwater that submarines use sound-based sonar to image their environment. Those shock waves don’t only shake the air particles, however, they can also shake whatever may be compressing them, like an aircraft attempting to reach supersonic speeds. For example, on average, sound travels four times faster in water than it does in air.Ĭan We Travel Faster Than Sound? How Much Faster?Īs sound travels through those air particles causing them to bump into one another, that air is being compressed in what we call a shock wave. In liquids, particles are closer together than they are in gases which makes it easier for sound waves to travel. How much lower? You can check out NASA’s online tools that allow you to calculate the speed of sound on different planets and at different altitudes. For example, the Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide where the speed of sound is lower than in air. The speed of sound also varies depending on the type of gas or medium. faster than the speed of sound) the higher in the atmosphere you go because air is cooler up there. So you don’t have to travel as fast to reach supersonic speeds (i.e. At 35,000 feet, a typical cruising altitude for passenger planes, the speed of sound is around 295 meters per second or 660 miles per hour. That is because in colder air, the air particles move more slowly and thus don’t propagate the sound wave as quickly. Note that the sound speed depends on the temperature of the air. At ~60 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s 15.5 degrees Celsius), the speed of sound is around 760 miles per hour (or 1,225 kilometers per hour). It takes a noticeable amount of time for sound to leave its source, travel across a canyon, for example, and then return to our ears. If you’ve ever listened to an echo, you know that the speed of sound is finite. There are, of course, places in space that are not empty, for example the clouds of dust and gas surrounding newborn stars, where sound could potentially travel.
#Speed of sound kmh movie#
As we learned from the movie Alien, “in space, no one can hear you scream." This is mostly true-space is predominantly a vacuum or close to it, meaning there are no particles there for sound perturbations to travel along. But without the people, there can be no wave, just like without the air particles there can be no propagation of sound. The people may jump out of their seats and throw their arms up, but they don’t move around the stadium, even though the wave does. So the air particles themselves don’t move very far, but the sound wave propagates along them.Ī pretty good analogy is “the wave” seen at stadiums. One particle gets bumped, and then it bumps into the next particle it encounters, causing the disturbance, or sound wave, to travel through the air. Sound moves through the air by causing those particles to bump into each other. Here on Earth, those particles happen to be mostly nitrogen and oxygen. We can think of the air around us as a collection of particles. To understand why the speed of sound varies, we first need to look at how sound travels. How does sound travel from a place like a speaker to our ears? What happens when you travel faster than the speed of sound? What is a sonic boom? But that speed is far from constant-for example, here on the ground, the speed of sound is much faster than at, say, 35,000 feet, where passenger planes tend to fly. A quick internet search tells me the speed of sound is 343 meters per second or 767 miles per hour.
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