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Writer's pictureAvinash Prasad

The Reality of Speed of Sound

Updated: Jun 5, 2020

Often when there is a lightning strike, it leaves a flash behind, but then it’s gone if you blinked or looked away then you wouldn’t know it happened, but that is until the thunder rolls in. We all know that sound is slower than light, and this is what creates the above mentioned phenomenon.


Well if in case you did not know, the speed of sound is 1223 kilometers an hour, which might seem really fast. However it is actually not that fast as most commercial airline cruise at about 900 kilometer an hour, like take the Concord airlines as an example, it used to fly at about 2179 kilometers an hour which is twice the speed of sound, yet it still took them about three hours to fly from New York to London.


But wait a minute, what we are speaking about is the speed of sound through air and the speed of sound really depends on the medium. The more rigid the object is the more quickly sound travels, even though density also plays a role, the rigidity plays a much bigger role. So let’s take something more rigid than air, like water. The thing about water is that it is incompressible, meaning that you can’t squeeze it like how you can with air and this is what partly helps the sound waves to travel faster, so the speed of sound is about 5,390 km per hour. So it makes sense that sound gets faster as you move from gas to solid right.


Well yes but except rubber. Rubber is the slowest medium through which air can move. Sound is so slow in rubber that most of all normal cars are faster than it. The speed of sound through rubber is about 217 km per hour, and taking in the fact that most cars can go at about 255 km per hour, sound is pretty slow.


But why don’t we go to the other end of rigidity: diamonds. Well diamonds are so rigid thanks to their rigid carbon structure. Well the speed of sound in diamonds are about 41,000 km per hour, and something worth talking about is the fact that that is faster than Earth’s escape velocity meaning that if we send a spaceship that fast, then it will leave Earth’s gravitational influence and never come back, that is how fast it is. Hope you liked this piece of information, Stay Home, Stay Safe.


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