Supersonic aircraft 5 is often referred to as hypersonic. In this region the problems of drag and heating are even more acute. It is difficult to make materials which can stand the forces and temperatures generated by air resistance at these speeds, and hypersonic flight for any significant length of time has not yet been achieved. A sonic boom is the sound associated with the shock waves created whenever an object traveling through the air travels faster than the speed of sound. Sonic booms generate significant amounts of sound energy, sounding similar to an explosion or a thunderclap to the human ear.
Shock wave be: Some other terms The abruptness of change in the features of the medium, that characterize shock waves, can be viewed as a phase transition: the pressure-time diagram of a supersonic object propagating shows how the transition induced by a shock wave is analogous to a "dynamic phase transition". When an object (or disturbance) moves faster than the information can propagate into the surrounding fluid, then the fluid near the disturbance cannot react or "get out of the way" before the disturbance arrives. In a shock wave the properties of the fluid (density, pressure, temperature, flow velocity, Mach number) change