eli5: I saw a post on instagram saying “Sonoluminescence – If you collapse an underwater bubble with a soundwave, light is produced, and nobody knows why” is this true?
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I’ve seen some good explanations so far, but since I have done this myself, I’ll throw my hat in the ring.
When you boil pure water, it creates very small bubbles. You can vibrate these bubbles using sound so that they expand, most effectively with resonance (think of being in tune with the water). Well, as the bubbles expand, they reach a tipping point (about 50x their original size). This tipping point is still exceedingly small. When the bubble passes this point, it collapses, or pops. This pop happens rapidly enough in such a small space that it has more energy than the surface of the sun. However, due to its constraints, the energy is only expressed as a very small flash of light (think about how when explosives “pop” there is a production of light).
There’s relatively limited research into the effect as far as I’m aware, but if you want to do some reading, I’d recommend looking at Seth Putterman’s papers.
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