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The speed of sound is the distance travelled per unit of time by a sound wave as it propagates through an elastic medium. More simply, the speed of sound is how fast vibrations travel. At 20 °C (68 °F), the speed of sound in air, is about 343 m/s (1,125 ft/s; 1,235 km/h; 767 mph; 667 kn), or 1 km in 2.91 s or one mile in 4.69 s.
The speed of sound depends on the medium the waves pass through, and is a fundamental property of the material. The first significant effort towards measurement of the speed of sound was made by Isaac Newton. He believed the speed of sound in a particular substance was equal to the square root of the pressure acting on it divided by its density:
a plot of the speed of sound in the ocean as a function of depth, where the vertical axis corresponds to the depth and the horizontal axis corresponds to the sound speed. By convention, the horizontal axis is placed at the top of the plot, and the vertical axis is labeled with values that increase from top to bottom, thus reproducing visually ...
For sound waves, the relation = holds, where is the speed of sound and is the magnitude of the wavenumber vector. Therefore, the eikonal satisfies a first order nonlinear partial differential equation ,
The speed of an acoustic wave depends on the properties of the medium it travels through; for example, it travels at approximately 343 meters per second in air, and 1480 meters per second in water. Acoustic waves encompass a broad range of phenomena, from audible sound to seismic waves and ultrasound, finding applications in diverse fields like ...
c is the speed of sound in the medium, which in air varies with the square root of the thermodynamic temperature. By definition, at Mach 1, the local flow velocity u is equal to the speed of sound. At Mach 0.65, u is 65% of the speed of sound (subsonic), and, at Mach 1.35, u is 35% faster than the speed of sound (supersonic).
English: Graph of the speed of sound in water vs temperature. Tabulated values (circle markers) from "The Engineering Toolbox" [1] . Smooth continuous line is a 3rd degree polynomial fit (see below) calculated on the tabulated data, accurate within 0.1%.
The speed of sound (i.e., the longitudinal motion of wavefronts) is related to frequency and wavelength of a wave by =.. This is different from the particle velocity , which refers to the motion of molecules in the medium due to the sound, and relates to the plane wave pressure to the fluid density and sound speed by =.