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!
As Angela Fritz, atmospheric scientist and deputy weather editor at The Washington Post explains, the lightning sounds like a Civil War cannon for a number of reasons. “The sound is the air being heated to 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The air around the lightning bolt expands faster than the speed of sound, which creates a shock wave of thunder.
Does lightning have a sound?
The sound originates at the lightning. The superheated air rapidly expands and then collapses back into itself, that rapid expansion and collapse is the source of the sound. If that happened at one spot, then all the sound would reach your ears at the same time and you would hear a single explosion. How is lightning made?
Is lightning attracted to a sound?
Lightning is attracted to the ground and clouds. You may have been brought up to believe that what attracts lightning is holding or wearing metal, and this is actually false. The position of a storm relative to the location of where someone is determines where lightning will strike. The very act of being outdoors during a thunderstorm will.
Thunder, the sound that follows lightning, comes from rapid air expansion around the lightning bolt. The heat from lightning causes the air around the bolt to reach temperatures of over 40,000 degrees Fahrenheit rapidly. The heated air compresses then explodes outwards, forming a shock wave and creating a loud noise.
Pale glowing plasma discharges, called corona and streamers, will often jump from the tips of trees and blades of grass, making a sizzling and clicking noise just before the lightning flash actually occurs. From first-hand experience, you may hear a crackling noise for half a second or so before the main discharge.
Does lightning go as fast as light or sound?
To answer your question, lightning travels at the speed of light. But you see lighting 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.
Does Thunder come from breaking the sound barrier?
I’ve also heard that the thunder comes from lightning breaking the sound barrier. This sounds weird to me since I would assume that lightning would be traveling at, well, light speed, so I’m not sure how the threshold could be crossed. How does lightning cause thunder? Show activity on this post. The sound barrier theory is complete nuts.
If I understand correctly, lightning is the discharge of electricity from the atmosphere into the planet. However, if I switch on a lamp, the wires are not causing thunder (or any audible sound). I’ve also heard that the thunder comes from lightning breaking the sound barrier.
When we were researching we ran into the inquiry “Does lightning always come before Thunder?”.
Another answer was lightning comes before thunder in a way, the speed of light, the lightning comes before the speed of sound, the thunder. Once lightning occurs, the thunder will ALWAYS follow. There is a sound barrier that covers the earth. When the lightning breaks it, we see it faster than we hear the thunder.
What is a sound barrier and how does it work?
The sound barrier can be defined as a hypothetical barrier to flight beyond the speed of sound, so postulated because the aircraft undergoes an abruptly increasing drag force induced by compression of the surrounding air when traveling near the speed of sound.
Accordingly, the speed of breaking the sound barrier changes with the surrounding atmospheric conditions. An easy example to see the sound barrier being broken is the crack that a bullwhip makes, where the tip of the whip moves faster than the speed of sound, causing the cracking sound (a small sonic boom).
Does sunlight make a sound?
The surface of the Sun produces sound waves because the surface is convecting and this produces pressure waves that travel into the inner corona. These pressure waves steepen into shock waves and this is possibly why the corona gets so hot.