Unseen World!

Who can forget “Top Gun”? Maverick, Ice-Man, Goose … the volleyball scene. But the coolest part of the movie was watching them fly those jets really fast. This week, the U.S. military released a photo that shows exactly how cool it is to go supersonic in an F-22.

Someone with a supersonic trigger finger snapped a photo of a Raptor F-22 flying over the aircraft carrier USS Stennis. The white triangular cloud that appears in the jet’s wake is called a “vapor cone, shock collar, or shock egg,” according to LiveScience. Or in nerd terms, a “Prandtl–Glauert singularity.”

Scientists say the singularity probably forms when water droplets get caught between “two crests of the sound waves” of the jet, creating a white cloud.