Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 88 1 b Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Let the observer have cylindrical coordinates and total distance . At retarded emission time , the source-observer distance isThe retarded time relation consequently becomesSet . ThenThe observer-direction Mach number at emission is . For a constant strength and , the single retarded root has . Substituting into the moving-source field gives the rotating acoustic point source resultIn particular, on the rotation axis and the result is .
For a genuinely varying source strength, replace by in the last formula. If , the retarded relation need not be one-to-one: each retarded root contributes with in the denominator. The general result is a sum of . Dropping the absolute value and the root sum requires the subsonic assumption. At the ideal point-source expression has a caustic; finite source size and bandwidth regularize that idealization.