• Question: Last week, in Peterborough, the whole town heard a sonic boom, and I was wondering what actually caused the boom?

    Asked by to Oliver, Heather, Dre, Charli, Becky on 14 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Oliver George

      Oliver George answered on 14 Jun 2014:

      I had a look on the internet and the MoD (the army people) say that it was caused by some military planes going supersonic. This is when the plane goes past the speed of sound. When a plane goes that fast it catches up with the sound waves it makes which causes them to be compressed (or squeezed) leading to a single shockwave which we hear as a boom. According to wikipedia this boom is actually constant along the path of the plane which leads to lots of upset people! If you could move faster than the speed of sound you could hear one planes boom multiple times but then you’d probably be causing your own sonic boom! Another interesting thing is that you’ll always see the thing making the sonic boom before you hear it because the sound hasn’t caught up to it.

    • Photo: Charlotte Flavell

      Charlotte Flavell answered on 15 Jun 2014:

      Hello alberteinstein12 – great screen name!

      I have to confess that I had to google this too, as the boom wasn’t loud enough for me to hear in Birmingham!

      As Oliver said, a sonic boom is a loud noise, like thunder, or sometimes an explosion, which happens when an object travels faster than the speed of sound.

      When you heard the noise last week, an aircraft had been spotted that wasn’t answering back when they tried to talk to it and find out what it was up to. Because they needed to make sure that it was safe, the military gave permission for one of their super fast aeroplanes (probably a jet fighter) to catch up with it and find out what it was doing. When it did this, it went “supersonic” and that is what caused the noise that you heard.

      In this case, when they caught up with it they were able to speak to the pilots and make sure that everything was OK and that there was nothing to worry about.

    • Photo: Rebecca Williams

      Rebecca Williams answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I didn’t know the answer to this question, like Oliver and Charli. But I’ve had a lot of fun looking it up!

      Most sonic booms are made by aeroplanes and Oliver said that this caused the sonic boom in Peterborough. Did you know that you can also get natural sonic booms? Anything that travels faster than the speed of sound creates a sonic boom. Thunder is a kind of sonic boom. Meteors could also cause a sonic boom.

      But the coolest natural sonic boom is made by a shrimp called the Pistol Shrimp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_shrimp. These guys are huge noise polluters in the ocean! They snap their claws together to make bubbles. When these bubbles collapse, they release temperatures of over 4000 degrees Celsius (the surface of the sun is about 5,500 °C!). The sound that is made by the bubbles collapsing reaches 218 decibels – that is louder than a space rocket taking off!

    • Photo: Andrea Cristini

      Andrea Cristini answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Have you heard anyone say Mach 1 before?

      This means the speed of the object (usually a plane) is equal to the speed of sound of the material it is in (usually the earth’s atmosphere). Mach 2 then is twice the speed of sound.

Comments