Popping a champagne cork generates a tiny supersonic shockwave
When you pop the cork on a champagne bottle, the physics of the cork's departure probably isn't the first thing on your mind — it's drinkin' time, after all! But scientists tend to find interesting things in the most unlikely of places, and a new study published in Science Advances reveals that the loud pop that you hear when cracking open a new bottle of champagne is accompanied by the birth of a tiny shockwave.
Using high-speed cameras to capture the tiniest details of the cork popping in slow motion, the researchers easily spotted the phenomenon. The shockwave, also called a Mach disk, appears in the plume streaming out of the top of the bottle in the instant the cork is shot out at high speed.
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Popping a champagne cork generates a tiny supersonic shockwave originally appeared on BGR.com on Sat, 28 Sep 2019 at 16:31:09 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.