• Question: Which one is faster the speed of sound going through water or the speed of light

    Asked by im slow to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 20 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      Heya,

      light is faster than sound anything including air, in water, in space and in anything else you can think of.

      In space, the speed of light in a vacuum is 186,282 miles per second, and in theory nothing should be able to travel faster than the speed of light. Light from the sun takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel to earth, that’s 149,600,000 km!

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 20 Nov 2014:

      Definitely light. Nothing is faster than light.

      In water, sound move at between 1,400 meters a second (if the water is at or near freezing) to 1,500 meters a second (if the water is near boiling). In hotter water, the molecules are all vibrating around faster, so they can transfer sound waves quicker.

      But the speed of light is a constant thing, no matter what it’s going through. And that speed is absolutely huge, 299,792,458 meters a second!

      So the speed of light beats the speed of sound in water by a factor of about 200,000 🙂

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