Many people are aware of the meteorite that recently crashed into Earth in Russia. With the availability of video recording hand-held devices, as well as, dash-cam cameras on cars, videos of the meteorite sweeping across the sky are everywhere on the web. There are reports of over 1000 injuries, many of which was due to the after effects of the sonic boom that took place from this meteor travelling at 33,000 miles per hour.
Youtube Username: RussiaToday
So what causes a sonic boom? A sonic boom is best understood by the waves/wakes made by forward movements in water. When a pebble is thrown into the water, small circular waves form and move away from the center, as seen in the figure below. A slow moving boat in the water, causes the same waves to form and move away in front and behind the boat.
If the boat travels faster than the movement of the waves, then a wake is formed from all of the concentric circles coming together.
Image from howstuffworks.com
When a meteorite travels through the air, it forms sound waves similar to the last illustration of the above diagrams. A sonic boom takes place when the object travelling through the air moves faster than the speed of sound, which is 700 miles per hour (approximately 47 times less than the speed of the meteorite). The sonic boom can be considered as the wake that forms from the sound waves since all of the waves that should be in front of the moving object are joined together behind the object causing the sound to occur after the passing of the object.
-Maral Altanbadralt
