If a jet made no noise, would it still do a supersonic ‘bang’ ?
No, it wouldn’t. A sonic boom happens when a noisy object, like a jet plane, travels faster than the sound it produces. Sound cannot travel through space, as it’s almost a total vacuum, so spacecraft that travel many times the speed of sound cannot create a sonic boom. Aerospace company Lockheed Martin has a jet in development that produces a gentle sonic ‘heartbeat’ when it breaks the speed of sound, so in the future there may be noisy supersonic jets in our skies that are able to pass through the sound barrier without the ear-splitting, signature sonic ‘boom’.