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 a fast moving supercritical thin layer to a stagnant thick heap. This flow configuration is particularly interesting because it is analogous to some hydraulic and aerodynamic situations associated with flow regime changes from supercritical to subcritical flows. Astrophysical environments feature many different types of shock waves. Some common examples are supernovae shock waves or blast waves travelling through the interstellar medium, the bow shock caused by the Earth's magnetic field colliding with the solar wind and shock waves caused by galaxies colliding with each other. Another interesting type of shock in astrophysics is the quasi-steady reverse shock or termination shock