What is the detonation velocity of nuclear bombs?
To be clear, I understand the explosion occurs "everywhere" in the core material, and does not have the shock wave front that conventional explosives have.
What I'm asking is what is the speed of fireballs edge when going from bomb sized to maybe 10 feet in diameter? Something maybe half the size of pic rel even.
the speed of sound.
Im not certain, but I am pretty confident this is not the answer.
For the surrounding area, it is correct. The atmosphere is what limits the speed. It also is the reason it works. The superheated air is what causes the effects.
If you detonate one in space, it does nothing but glow bright as frick and give off a strong electromagnetic pulse.
That tower is 300 feet tall, and the photo was taken 1 millisecond after detonation.
In human terms the velocity is instantaneous.
The gamma radiation and heat are about the speed of light. So 3x10^8 m/s.
That's just the flash heating though from prompt super critical status. There is a subsequent blast wave that impacts later and does most of the destruction. I have no idea about its speed but at least initially it is supersonic.
Initially the gamma radiation is what does all of the damage. The blast wave just clears the dust of what was.
The terminal effects on structures, armor, ships, anything other than infantry in the open are almost entirely dependent on the blast overpressure, not the gamma burst. Even against personnel the gamma exposure is unlikely to be lethal if you have any sort of cover at all.
Again, the question was about the 10-foot zone around the device.
>the question was about the 10-foot zone around the device.
Then the "detonation velocity" is equal to the speed of light, because at such close distances everything starts superheating and exploding from intense gamma rays as soon as the reaction goes supercritical
Gamma radiation by its self does not have any moment of intertia.
Remember that the question is about from a 0 to 5 foot radius.
>Nerd asked a straightforward but difficult question, diverts to something easier but cool sounding
You could have just said you didn't know, lol. That might work on comic book battle forums but it doesn't pass here.
'Bout tree fiddy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
>The nuclear bomb was detonated underground which caused the 900-kilogram (2000lb) manhole cover above it to be launched into the atmosphere at more than 66km/s or 41 miles per second
I bet the speed of the fireball's edge is much more than that since 900kg probably takes quite a bit of force to accelerate to such an insane speed
>mfw being on outpost duty and just seeing the cap blast into the upper stratousphere followed by a pillar of fire.
https://gizmodo.com/no-a-nuclear-explosion-did-not-launch-a-manhole-cover-1715340946
around 800 km/s for the first second following detonation
Detonation velocity is for the explosive material itself, so it should just be the speed of sound of air in that place. It may be radiated to be much hotter thus raising speed of sound, and materials inside, be it gas, liquid or solid may already have velocity faster than the ambient gas to out run the shockwave with their own.
Is there any explanation for those flares of ejecta extending out of the bottom of the fireball? Why does that matter move so much significantly faster than the otherwise near-spherical fireball?
It's something about the ropes or whatever holding up the tower. IIRC they get rid of the "spikes" by coating them in some reflective material that doesn't instantly combust.
Molten fragments of the tower being propelled downward faster due to closer proximity to the bomb perhaps?
That's light and radiation from the fireball vaporizing the steel cables supporting the tower.
The guy wires of the tower. Iirc, it was because the metal could transmit the heat/energy more quickly than the air.
These combined. The steel in the cables are highly x-ray and neutron opaque, so they heat up way faster than the air around them. Then as the fireball expands and emits more heat, the cables essentially just explode.
The stuff that close is all ablated to plasma by the x-ray and neutron emissions of the core during fission. Probably starting on the 40th (ish) ~500 ns, fission generation your energy density gets high enough that the area around the bomb starts heating from x-rays and over the next 500 ns it all separately explodes as the x-ray and neutron flux heats it. So I'd guess ~.5 to 1 microsecond.
The pic you posted is WAY bigger than 10 feet and expansion of the (that thing is a fireball) is governed by different physics.
Black person, you could Google this.
I tried man.
IIRC somewhere around 6000 m/s.
There are conventional explosives with a higher det velocity, like astrolite G.
https://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Effects-of-Nuclear-Weapons-1977-3rd-edition-complete.pdf
p. 27-26
>Within seven-tenths of a millisecond from the detonation, the fireball from a 1-megaton weapon is about 440 feet and this increases to a maximum value of about 5,700 feet in 10 seconds.
>It is then rising at a rate of 250 to 350 feet per second.
p. 38
>After the lapse of 10 seconds, when the fireball of a 1-megaton nuclear weapon has obtained its maximum size (5,700 feet across) the shock front has traveled some 3 miles farther ahead.
>At 50 seconds after the explosion, when the fireball is no longer visible, the blast wave has traveled about 12 miles.
>It is then moving at 1,150 feet per second, which is slightly faster than the speed of sound at sea level.
Actual book goes into a lot more depth.
fast
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html#PascalA
depth 485 feet
>Ogle: "What time does the shock arrive at the top of the pipe?"
>RRB: "Thirty one milliseconds."
485 ft / 31 milliseconds = 4769 meters per second
This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.
>Figure 2 illustrates the distribution of pressure and of velocity at this same time (34 µs) for this one megaton sea level example. The pressures show a similar profile to those of the temperatures within the hot air and further show the shock wave that is associated with the expanded bomb vapors. Similarly, the bomb vapors are seen to be expanding at an extremely high velocity, while the air is just beginning to move out in the rest of the fireball. Of course, as the bomb vapors expand they pick up the air and compress it highly in this non-adibatic, nearly isothermal, interior shock
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0612197.pdf
So, also always wondered, what am I looking at? Is this a raw blob of plasma?