Light doesn't need a medium to travel
. The speed of sound through air is about 340 meters per second. It's faster through water and it's even faster through steel. Light will travel through a vacuum at 300 million meters per second.
Why is sound so slow?
Sound waves are made up of kinetic energy.
It takes more energy to make large molecules vibrate than it does to make smaller molecules vibrate
. Thus, sound will travel at a slower rate in the more dense object if they have the same elastic properties.
Why can people fly faster than the speed of sound but not the speed of light?
According to the author of “To Fly,” why can people fly faster than the speed of sound but not faster than the speed of light?
the speed of light is simply too fast
. the speed of sound is difficult enough to beat. The laws of physics prevent breaking the light barrier.
Is lightning slower than sound?
Lightning travels at the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second. This means that you see lightning pretty much when it happens. When lightning strikes, a noise is made which we call thunder.
Thunder travels much slower, at the speed of sound, about 1088 feet per second.
Is lightning faster than sound?
Lightning and thunder happen at the same time. But you see lightning before you hear thunder because
light, which travels a million times faster than sound
, arrives almost instantly. Sound, on the other hand, takes about five seconds to travel one mile.
Is sound louder in hot or cold air?
Sound is louder in
cold air
. This is because as the temperature goes down the sound waves have a tendency to refract more and they are usually refracted towards the ground. Further, the intensity of the sound will be higher.
How fast is the speed of dark?
Darkness travels at the speed of light
. More accurately, darkness does not exist by itself as a unique physical entity, but is simply the absence of light. Any time you block out most of the light – for instance, by cupping your hands together – you get darkness.
Does sound travel faster than a bullet?
The fastest bullets travel more than 2,600 feet per second. That's equivalent to over 1,800 miles per hour. To put that in perspective, it's amazing to realize that
bullets travel over twice the speed of sound
!
Is there anything faster than the speed of light?
Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity famously dictates that
no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum
, which is 299,792 km/s. This speed limit makes it unlikely that humans will ever be able to send spacecraft to explore beyond our local area of the Milky Way.
What happens if an airplane flies faster than the speed of sound?
Anything exceeding the speed of sound
creates a “sonic boom
“, not just airplanes. An airplane, a bullet, or the tip of a bullwhip can create this effect; they all produce a crack. This pressure change created by the sonic boom can be quite damaging.
Does sound travel faster than light in water?
Speed of light in water is 3/4 of the speed of light in air.
Sound travels three times faster in water than in air
. Waves bend towards the slower region.
Which is first thunder or lightning?
If we are watching the sky,
we see the lightning before we hear the thunder
. That is because light travels much faster than sound waves. We can estimate the distance of the lightning by counting how many seconds it takes until we hear the thunder.
Can you have thunder without lightning?
No, it is not possible to have thunder without lightning
. Thunder starts as a shockwave from the explosively expanding lightning channel when a large current causes rapid heating. However, it is possible that you might see lightning and not hear the thunder because it was too far away.
Is lightning hotter than the sun?
In fact, lightning can heat the air it passes through to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit (
5 times hotter than the surface of the sun
).
Can lightning break the sound barrier?
The channel heats to about 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit!.
The rapid expansion of the heated air around the channel breaks the sound barrier
, and you hear thunder. One lightning stoke can generate between 100 million and 1 billion volts of electricity!
How fast is lightning in mph?
The speed of lightning
While the flashes we see as a result of a lightning strike travel at the speed of light (670,000,000 mph) an actual lightning strike travels at a comparatively gentle
270,000 mph
.
What happens to the human body when struck by lightning?
Dr. Griggs says if a person is struck by lightning, it can cause cardiac arrest, which stops a person's body from circulating blood and cause direct injury to the brain and nervous system, preventing the brain from being able to send the appropriate signals to tell the body to continue breathing.
Why is it louder at night?
This leaves a warmer layer in the upper atmosphere until the next day's sun heats the ground and then we warm from the ground up.
When we have a thunderstorm at night, sound bounces off of that warm layer and has nowhere else to go but down and to our ears
. This is why it's much louder at night.
Why can I hear better at night?
Actually, sound transmits farther at night
may be related to refraction of sound waves
! First, sound is the vibration of air, and it is a kind of wave motion. The propagation of sound wave is faster in hot air and slower in cold air.
Why is traffic louder at night?
The effect often happens at dawn and dusk because
sound bends from hotter air into cooler air
. During the day, the ground is hotter than the air above it so sound bends vertically upward. “Its only when the sun stops falling on the ground that the ground cools down. Then the air gets hotter above,” he said.
What is the fastest thing in the universe?
Light
travels about 186,270 miles (more than seven times the circumference of Earth) in one second. In modern physics, light is regarded as the fastest thing in the universe, and its velocity in empty space as a fundamental constant of nature.
Can shadows move faster than light?
The simple answer is
yes; a shadow can move faster than the speed of light
. But this doesn't break any physical law, because a shadow is not a real object. A shadow is the absence of light.
Is black hole faster than light?
Definition of a black hole
A black hole is an object whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. The definition is correct, but it does not give a good picture of why light cannot escape. I prefer a different definition.
A black hole is a place where space is falling faster than light
.
Can a bullet break the sound barrier?
The speed of sound is fast, but bullets move faster. In fact,
bullets can move fast enough to break the sound barrier
.
Why do bullets not cause sonic boom?
The conical shockwave behind the bullet that causes the sonic boom never passes your ears
. They are inside the geometrically extended cone from the start (or behind the cone if you will). So the expanding cone surface (sonic boom shockwave) never passes them.
Do sniper bullets travel faster than sound?
In reality, most firearms are supersonic weapons, meaning that
their bullets move faster than the speed of sound
. You would see a sniper's bullet arrive before hearing its arrival. In fact, you'd see and hear all of that before you'd even hear the bullet being fired.
