• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How Fast Is The Speed Of Smell?

July 31, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

The speed of light in a vacuum is the same wherever you measure it in the universe, according to Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Whether you’re sat on Earth, Mars, or Andromeda, if you measure the speed of light you’ll find it chugging along at a cool 299,792,458 meters per second (983,571,056.43 feet per second), the absolute speed limit of the universe.

Advertisement

Sound is not the same as light. As the poster for Alien explains, in space no-one can hear you scream. Or to put it another way that won’t sell as many movie tickets, sound cannot travel through a vacuum because it is a vibration propagating as an acoustic wave through a medium, be it liquid, solid, or gas. 

Sound moves at different speeds through those mediums, traveling faster through greater densities. On Earth, sound moves at 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) per second in water, and in air around 340 meters (1,115 feet) per second. In solids, sound moves much faster, though how fast depends on the solid. 

Scientists attempting to calculate the fastest that sound could possibly travel found that it decreases with the mass of the atom, implying that sound would be fastest if it were to propagate through solid hydrogen. Though solid hydrogen only occurs at astonishingly high pressures like those found inside gas giants like Jupiter, they calculated that sound would move along at 36 kilometers per second (22 miles per second) in it, likely the fastest possible speed that sound can travel.

So, what about smell? Firstly, smell occurs when odors – volatized chemical compounds – bind to receptors in your nasal cavity. Some compounds are more volatile than others, meaning that they evaporate more easily in normal Earth conditions, which is what you end up smelling. 

Since it is the volatile chemical compound that you are detecting, rather than a wave traveling through a medium, smell is a lot slower than sound. It depends upon the medium through which the smell is traveling. Like sound, pressure and temperature affect how fast smell can propagate. 

Advertisement



Smell will diffuse in all possible directions until equilibrium is reached, thanks to the pesky second law of thermodynamics. At some point, assuming the room in which you farted is large enough, the smell will become so diffuse that your olfactory receptors are unable to detect it. Before this time, smells are subject to air flows in the environment/elevator in which you find yourself.

Different compounds travel at different speeds, as shown by Graham’s Law of effusion, with heavier molecules effusing more slowly than lighter molecules. While the speed of a smell is heavily dependent on the factors of pressure, temperature, and air flow, there are ways of approximating it.

Using Graham’s Law, for example, Alasdair Wilkins of Gizmodo compared a compound used in perfume to a compound thought to be one of the main ones responsible for the smell of farts, finding that farts travel slightly quicker. Do with this information what you will.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Chipotle adds smoked brisket in United States and Canada after tests
  2. An intensifying arms race in Asia
  3. Two New Minerals Never Seen Before On Earth Extracted From Huge Meteorite
  4. If You Want To Boost Your Social Status, Lower Your Vocal Pitch

Source Link: How Fast Is The Speed Of Smell?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Plate Tectonics And CO2 On Planets Suggest Alien Civilizations “Are Probably Pretty Rare”
  • How To Watch The “Awkward” Partial Solar Eclipse This Weekend
  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version