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?
In: Other
It’s true to the extent that we don’t know *for sure* why it happens, but it’s not as sensational as the title would suggest, as we have quite a few solid hypothesis. The leading theories are well explained in the Wikipedia article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_sonoluminescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_of_sonoluminescence)
Worth noting that this is not some sort of “unexplainable cosmic secret”, it’s just an odd uncommon phenomenon that has little practical use, so nobody is really devoting much resources to studying it. If for some reason we *really* needed to know, we could very likely figure it out real fast.
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