Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society

with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethus and the Society's deputy

director Dr Robert Massey. This is the place where we answer your questions. So all these

questions have been sent in either by

emailing us at podcast rass dot uk or by messaging us on instagram at supermassive pot so thank you to

everyone who sent us an email about space potatoes we might have to come back to that at a later date

oh i'm so excited with the Space Potatoes episode.

Right, let's dive into the supermassive mailbox.

So, Robert, let's start with this question from Jake on behalf of his clever six-year-old son.

He says, hello, my son, Archie is six and loves all things space.

He's asked, if sound can't travel in space, would there be a sonic boom if you

were to travel faster than the speed of sound? Can I just say, I was not asking questions like this

at six years old. So, well done, Archie. Yeah, I mean, me neither. Absolutely not. No, no. Thank you,

Archie. That's a brilliant question, actually, as well. And mostly, the answer answer is no because you're quite right that

space essentially rather than say stars planets things of atmospheres solids liquids and

so on can't carry sound because you need a gas liquid or solid where the particles are close enough

for that to work for them to be compressed and for a wave to move through them they have to interact

with each other quite closely, essentially.

And a sonic boom happens when something like a plane is traveling faster than sound in our

atmosphere, and then you get the shockwave that results. But there are sort of some cases where it

happens. And one example I came across was that there's a supermassive black hole in the biggest

galaxy and the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 million light years away. That was observed by the X-ray

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