> The boom is caused by the air being compressed in front of the object? Is the loudness of the engines irrelevent to the intensity of the boom, it's all due to

> The boom is caused by the air being compressed in front of the object? Is the loudness of the engines irrelevent to the intensity of the boom, it's all due to speed? Yes, that’s it exactly. The part I would add is that after the air gets compressed, it rebounds, which is a wave. This wave emanates at the speed of sound. Ok fine, but what does that mean? At subsonic speeds, each new pressure/sound wave emanating from the object is contained within the expanding sphere of the wave that came before it. Think of ripples in a pond, with each new ripple slightly to the left, but still completely “contained” by the one before it. The two ripples expand and never touch. (We’re pretending our pond has no edges here and that the waves don’t reflect.) At supersonic speeds, the center of a new wave is outside the expanding previous wave. This has significant consequences for how the two waves interact. Subsonically, they didn’t interact at all. But supersonically, each new wave is expanding outside the previous wave, which means that pretty quickly they collide. And when they collide, they interfere. This interference is what goes boom.