What is a sonic boom, I’ve heard many people use it but I don’t know what it is
In: Physics
Imagine a pond (or puddle). If you drop something into it, you get ripples. This is kind of how sound works in air when you make a single loud noise; it makes a wave that bounces around.
Now instead of dropping a single object, imagine a boat floating in the pond. It keeps bobbing on the surface, so it keeps making ripples. This is how something that continues to make noise works in air; a bunch of ripples bounce around and interacts with the other ripples.
Now instead of standing still, the boat is moving across the pond. Each time it moves it creates a new ripple in its new position. If the boat moves slower than the ripples, you get a pattern of ripples where some are closer together near where the boat is moving towards, and farther apart where the boat is moving away from. This is how subsonic Doppler effects work, such as a siren sounding higher pitched when driving towards you than when it is driving away of you.
Now, instead of moving slower than the ripples, the boat is moving faster than the ripples are. Each new ring of a ripple is outside of the previous ones. But this means that there will come a line to the side of the boats movement where all the ripples will hit at the same time; this is how a boat’s wake happens, and why faster boats will have a wake that is bigger and more disruptive (more ripples hitting at the same time). This is how a sonic boom works; it’s basically a bunch of sound waves hitting things at the same time, like a boats wake but through the air.
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