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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Boom Let's Learn About Sonic Booms

Posted by Megan Seling on Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 2:30 PM

So those booms were sonic booms from military jets that responded to a breach of presidential airspace. Exciting! Let's learn more about our new friend, the sonic boom. From wikipedia.org:

*A sonic boom is the sound associated with the shock waves created by the supersonic flight of an aircraft.

*A sonic boom is usually heard as a deep double 'boom' as the aircraft is usually some distance away.

*Duration of sonic boom is brief; less than a second, 100 milliseconds (0.1 second) for most fighter-sized aircraft and 500 milliseconds for the space shuttle or Concorde jetliner.

*Ground width of the boom exposure area is approximately one statute mile for each 1,000 feet of altitude (5 m/m); that is, an aircraft flying supersonic at 30,000 feet will create a lateral boom spread of about 30 miles, or at 10,000 meters a spread of 50 kilometers.

And my personal favorite sonic boom fact:

*The cracking sound a bullwhip makes when properly wielded is, in fact, a small sonic boom. The end of the whip, known as the "cracker", moves faster than the speed of sound, thus creating a sonic boom.

This is what it looks like (no sound, but you already know what it sounds like—BOOM!):

The more you know.

Comments (18) RSS

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The expanding gas cloud from a really big explosion using amfol to move tons of rock and earth is not quite the same as a sonic boom - but it's really fun to watch. Make sure you open your mouth just a bit tho, cause the shock wave compression can hurt.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on August 17, 2010 at 2:45 PM

Today's other fun fact: Most of the sound you hear when a gun is fired is from the bullet breaking the sound barrier, not the actual explosion in the chamber.

Posted by Fifty-Two-Eighty

on August 17, 2010 at 2:56 PM

Fifty-Two-Eighty: sorry but that is a weird myth you dug up somewhere. For instance, most all handgun ammunition is subsonic.

Posted by seattleanon on August 17, 2010 at 3:01 PM

@3 I assume most people got it from the book Fight Club and then passed it on to become an annoying rumor.

Posted by tigntink on August 17, 2010 at 3:08 PM

Now, if you want a fun bullet, try one of those rocket shells. Those sound really cool. Really inaccurate, though.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on August 17, 2010 at 3:15 PM

@3 Dead wrong. The speed of sound @ sea level with an ambient temperature of 75 degrees is 1133 feet per second. MANY handgun cartridges exceed this. Even the lowly .22 long rifle in high velocity loadings exceeds the speed of sound.

Posted by Westside forever on August 17, 2010 at 3:22 PM

@2 one of the most unnerving sounds in the world is to hear one of those tiny sonic booms close to you.
@3 lurk moar.

Posted by playswithknives on August 17, 2010 at 3:34 PM

All this talk about sonic booms and the speed of sound and no mention of this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_yeage…

btw and different topic... how does one link a webpage to a word in this place?

Posted by Urgutha Forka on August 17, 2010 at 3:42 PM

@8:

[a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_yeager"]Testosterone[/a].

With the square brackets replaced by angle brackets (shift-comma, shift-period). Thusly:

Testosterone

Posted by rob!