Making Waves with Sound
wave your hand made travels through the water? Sound travels in just the same way!
Sound also travels differently depending on what it’s moving through. If you had a microscope more powerful than anything on the planet, you would be able to see that everything around us is made up of tiny particles called atoms. The atoms in a gas, like air, are far apart and whizzing around. The atoms in a liquid are closer together, but slosh past each other. The atoms in a solid are packed tightly together and locked into one shape.
When sound waves travel through air, the atoms are spaced so far apart that it’s hard for one group of atoms to reach the next group to pass the sound wave along. Sound waves in air fade away very fast.
Because the atoms in liquid are much closer together, it’s much easier for them to bump into each other and pass the sound wave along.
