Just curious 🙂
In: Physics
Sound moves at a fixed speed, much much slower than light. That’s why you hear the crack of thunder after you see the flash of lightning.
When you have a plane trying to cross from flying slower than sound to flying faster than sound, it experiences stress from the air “piling up” just in front of it, as the sound of an airplane is a compression wave in the air. Many planes were destroyed figuring out how to do this, thus the term “sound barrier”. It turns out that only some shapes of planes can go through this transition without being damaged.
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