A few weekends ago my best friend Katie and I decided to drive around the island - you know, just for funsies :) . As I was procrastinating writing this blog by looking through the photo log of our drive, I came across a video we took when a few of the military jets flew overhead when we were near Wheeler Air Force Base and we heard them breaking the sound barrier. It took me a while to recognize it, but this was perfect for my blog!
The reason we could hear the three jets as they flew overhead was because they were traveling as fast as their own sound waves. This make it so the sound waves piled up on one another in front of the moving object. The sound waves then form a mach cone, or wave cone, which is a cone-shaped disturbance made when an object moves faster than the speed of sound. The surface of the cone is the shock wave and the angle of the cone narrows at greater speeds. Chuck Yeager was the first man to break the "sound barrier" (a term coined by the early fighter pilots who survived when their aircraft approached the speed of sound in a dive and lost all control and told stories about this barrier that if you tried to punch through, you were doomed) back on October 14, 1947.
So had I stopped to think about what was going on when the fighter jets were making noise above us, I probably could have regurgitated all of this information that I knew about traveling at the speed of sound, and breaking the barrier. Buuuuuuuuut, if I had Katie probably would have been disturbed at my nerdy-self so its probably better that I didn't (: .
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