eli5 How does the sound barrier break when planes fly? What is the boom? Plane accumulating wind or what is happening?
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Imagine a boat on a pond, if you jump up and down in the boat, ripples will expand outward from the boat. Breaking the sound barrier is like the boat moving faster than those ripples, and the sonic boom is the wake.
Plane sends out sound waves.
Sound waves move fast, but not that fast.
Plane goes very fast, faster than the sound wave.
Each sound wave in front of the plane is catching up to the ones in front of it because they are going faster and faster with the velocity of the plane.
At a certain point, all the sound waves come together and make one really big sound wave, which makes a boom.
You are sort of right to think of accumulating wind, as that’s the medium the waves travel in.
A sonic boom occurs when the speed of a plane matches the speed of sound.
What happens is that the individual sound waves generated by the plane over the period of time during which the sonic boom occurs all catch with with each other and add together to cause one massive shock wave.
You’re getting hung up on the word “break”. Nothing breaks. It’s a figure of speech, in this case meaning “to exceed”. Think about “breaking” somebody’s record.
What makes the boom is the compression waves hitting the listener’s ear. You hear it as a momentary boom because it passes you quickly; in reality, that compression wave is continuous and emanates from the aircraft as long as it remains supersonic.
After a certain speed, air acts more like water than it does air, so to speak. When you hit the surface of water, it makes a splash sound, right? When you ski on the surface of water, the splash sound is continuous, right? Kind of the same thing with the air. It’s constantly “breaking the surface” of the air, and making that continuous “splash” sound. But much louder, because the surface area of the airplane is breaking a lot of the air all at once instead of just the small surface area of, say, a bullet or a whip, which does the same thing when making that “crack” sound.
Fun fact: if you’re in the plane creating the sonic boom you won’t hear it, because you’re moving faster than it
So i have read your comments. Air have mass. You push air forward and then press it together and then it burst?
Think of how a boat creates a wake when it reaches a certain speed. Airplanes do the same thing with air. A 3-D wake in the air is a cone, which will be the wave that is created by the object traveling faster than sound
If you could run at the same speed of a vehicle breaking the sound barrier and kept up with it you would be in a constant boom?
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