In the USA, scientists plan to record an 18mm hypersonic projectile hitting water at a speed of about 14,500 km/h. This has been reported by Case Western Reserve University.

At these speeds, solids and liquids can start behaving abnormally. “Even now, in 2022, the scientific community doesn’t really know what exactly will happen to the water in an event like this.Brian Schmidt, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said. But there is reason to believe that really strange things can happen, from the formation of ice to the emission of light.”.

The experiment will use a 12-foot airgun, often used to simulate a meteorite impact. The depth of the water tank exceeds 9 meters. The entire experiment will be filmed with a high-speed camera capable of capturing up to 200 million frames per second.

Scientists theoretically predict the occurrence of three effects: ice formation, cavitation, and sonoluminescence. In the 1950s, physicists predicted that water struck by a supersonic projectile could form “exotic ice”; exotic ice was anything other than the “regular” hexagonal ice most common on Earth and in space. Cavitation is the formation of vapor bubbles in a liquid when accelerated to high velocities, for example when struck by a high velocity projectile. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to see cavitation behind the bullet”, says Schmidt. Sonoluminescence is the emission of light by a liquid through the passage of a sound wave.

14,500 km/h is considered hypersonic in the atmosphere, but sound travels faster in water, so the collision would technically be supersonic. The experiment is scheduled for the summer of 2023, and its implementation is closely related to the US military development in the field of hypersonic weapons.