science
You always see a distant lightning flash before you hear the thunder, because light outpaces this by almost a million times.
Sound travels through air at roughly 1,200 kilometers per hour, or about 343 meters per second, a speed that depends on the density and temperature of the air it's moving through. Light, by contrast, travels so fast that it essentially arrives instantly over these distances, which is why during a thunderstorm you see the lightning flash immediately but the accompanying thunder arrives moments later, the delay growing longer the farther away the storm is.
100 km/h badly understates how fast sound actually moves through air, and 50,000 km/h drastically overstates it; sound's true speed sits comfortably between those two extremes at around 1,200 km/h.
Because sound takes a predictable amount of time to travel, you can roughly estimate your distance from a lightning strike by counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder and dividing by about three, since sound covers roughly one kilometer every three seconds.
science
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