In which  medium does sound travel fastest?
550989
Sound travels fastest through solids. This is because molecules in a solid medium are much closer together than those in a liquid or gas, allowing sound waves to travel more quickly through it. In fact, sound waves travel over 17 times faster through steel than through air. The exact speed of sound in steel is 5,960 meters per second (13,332 mph)! But, this is only for the majority of solids. The speed of sound in all solids are not faster than in all liquids.
171646
It depends on the volume of the noise, and its attenuation in the medium it is traveling in. \n\nHowever, I might make a few comments that are somewhat relevant to this:\n\n1. The attentuation of sound depends on frequency. Thunder that is close by is a sharp high pitched noise, whereas distant thunder is a low rumbling noise. That is because the air absorbs high frequencies. So low frequencies travel further than high frequencies.\n\n2. Using diffraction, reflection and refraction, sound can be made to travel much further than it would normally. Consider the case of whispering galleries, where sound is focused by the shape of the walls, and is audible at much greater distances than it would be otherwise. A similar process is employed by parabolic mikes to focus distant sounds so they are more audible than they would be otherwise.\n\n3. Trapped waves at boundaries, or in acoustic channels, can travel very long distances. For example, the SOFAR channel in the ocean is used by whales to communicate with other whales thousands of miles away, on the other side of an ocean, or even on the other side of the earth.\n\n4. The 1883 Krakatoa volcanic explosions (estimated to be the 5th largest known to history) were heard 3000 miles away, and over about 10% of the earth's surface. More than half of the crew of a nearby British ship had their eardrums blown out by the noise. The low frequency components of the sound continued to travel around the world 7 times even though they were too low frequency for people to hear them. So this noise traveled about 140,000 miles, even though it was too low for humans to hear it.
78979
None, sound is a wave not a particle. Sound is just a wave of vibrations travelling through atoms.
269469
Sound travels in waves like light or heat does, but unlike them, sound travels by making molecules vibrate. So, in order for sound to travel, there has to be something with molecules for it to travel through. On Earth, sound travels to your ears by vibrating air molecules. In deep space, the large empty areas between stars and planets, there are no molecules to vibrate. There is no sound there.
44625
The speed of sound (at sea level) approximately is 340.29 m/s and can be used as a global estimate for the speed of sound for the purposes of this calculation.  That would mean that students measuring such a sound would need to be seperated by 340 meters to measure even a 1 second delay in sound propagation.  Additionally they would need to be able to perfectly synchronize the start of the sound event and the start of stopwatch event.  Making it even worse is the need to react with enough speed to stop the stopwatch upon reciept of the signal without significant reaction delay.\n\nThe experiment would be simply to accomplish with resources to control synchronization and detection equipment, but it would not be a low-budget, high-school type of experiment.
161386
Probably ultrasonic....
34154
sound travels at an avg speed of .78999342 mps or 2843.9763 MPH in seawater depending on water temperature salinity and depth of the source/receiver.\n\nlight averages 186,282 mps or 11,176,920 mph\n\nthe other answers AREN'T WRONG but you should have specified through what medium they are traveling. also you need to specify temperature humidity pressure altitude/depth salinity and or a myriad of other factors\n\nLight has a different speed when passing through our atmosphere than it does through space just as sound through air and water or a solid. the more dense the material the faster the sound transmission. oddly the opposite is true for light.\n\nthis question has been asked several times before.  if you do a search for previous questions you will doubtless find MANY other answers for these very questions with more precise speeds through different mediums.
1013560
The answer depends upon what sort of wave you are talking about and the medium it is travelling. Say for example if it is a light wave through vacuum, then \n\nWavelength = (2.99875 X 10^8) / Frequency.\n\nIf the same is sound through air at 60% humidity and at sea level, then\n\nWavelength = (340) / Frequency.\n\nIf it is a sound wave through water (4 degrees celsius), then\n\nWavelength = (1440) / Frequency.\n\nThe value inside the bracket is the speed of the wave in the respective medium under respective conditions.
516568
when you travel faster than the speed of sound.
736786
because LIGHT travels faster than SOUND!!!\n\nSpeed of light:  186,282.397 miles per second\n\nSpeed of sound:  1238 km/h or 770 mph
1005278
Yes, light travels faster than sound. You can tell from several \nexamples. The best would probably be that of lightning and thunder. The next \ntime during a storm, if you notice when lightning flashes across the sky and \nwhen you hear thunder, you will find that it is always the lightning that \nflashes before the thunder. This is because lightning (i.e. light) travels \nfaster than thunder (i.e. sound), and reaches you faster, so that you see the \nlightning before you hear the thunder. In fact, light is enormously faster than \nsound. Light travels at 300,000,000 metres per second (i.e. 300 million metres \nper second), while poor old sound travels only at 330 metres per second.
143776
hey now.  just a minute.  density is not the only factor that determines the speed of sound in a solid.  also at issue is the "stiffness" of the material; in physics terms this is called the elastic modulus.  so the speed of sound is higher in diamond (12000 m/s) than it is in lead (1600 m/s) even though lead is denser.\n\nin general the equation for the speed of sound in a bulk material is v = sqrt(B/p) where B is the elastic modulus and p is the density.  \n\nthe elastic modulus is not a particularly simple quantity to derive from first principles, compared to density - it has to do with how the material is structured on an atomic level.  however the speed is certainly easy to measure.  here is a page with some tabulated values for various materials:  http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/soundv.html\n\nit shows that brass has a higher speed of sound.
1138474
Mach is speed of sound, so M3 is ~2200 mph.\n\nYou could hear your voice because we hear our own vioce partially through internal resonance, which would not be affected by external velocity.
255915
Yes, speed of sound is "fixed", like the speed of light and does not depend on the frequency\n\nFrequency affects the volume, if it's peak and trough changes. Higher the peak and trough, the louder the sound and vice versa.\n\nFrequency affects the pitch,if it gets higher or lower. Higher the frequency, higher the pitch, lower the frequency lower the pitch.\n\nHowever sound does change speed depending on the medium it's traveling in.  It travels faster in water,I believe.\nAnd it cannot travel in vacum, so it has zero speed in space.
829236
First of all, 3 x 10^8 m/s is the speed of light in a vacuum. Thanks for nothing there.\n\nNow, for the speed of sound ...\n\nThe typically cited value is about 340 m/s in standard atmosphere, but the actual speed of sound varies with the medium. \n\nFor an ideal gas, the speed of sound is defined as follows:\n\na = SQRT(gamma*R*T), where gamma is the ratio of the heat capacities of the gas, R is the universal gas constant, and T is the absolute gas temperature. Similar correlations exist for the speed of sound in solids and liquids which depend on the density and thermophysical properties of the medium.
300281
Sound travels through the air at about 330 meters/second.  Kids have been taught for years in Scouts that it takes 5 seconds for a the sound of a lightning-generated thunderclap to travel a mile.  It doesn't take very sophisticated electronics to generate a sound pulse, simultaneously start a clock, and measure the time it takes for the sound to bounce off its target and return.  Real estate agents for years have used a small device that does this to measure room sizes.  Limiting factors are the distance to be measured and the amount of sound reflected.
629732
Sound is a compressional wave and it requires atoms to make energy travel through. think of a pool stick being your mouth. being on earth is the same as having pool balls in front of it therefor the nergy is transferred. however in space, think of your pool stick without any pool balls in front of your stick. nothing happens. becuase there is nothing to transfer the energy. the medium is the matter that carries the sound waves.\n\nLight is a very special wave. it has tiny particles called photons that are infinity small(meaning we can't measure them but we know they are there becuase they ionize special elements.) so light is really a combination of energy and matter. and since light has a medium(tiny particles) within itself it doesn't need any other matter to travel. it can change mediums however, light travels faster in less dense areas than more dense areas which explains that is has tiny particles. sound is just a compressional wave which means when the matter is more dense it travels faster becuase the time required to travel is less becuase the molecules are closer. since light has its own molecules it can't travel through dense matter becuase the dense molecules block the light's particles from traveling.