system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If breaking the sound barrier results in a sonic boom, would going faster than the speed of light have a similar effect?

I know it's theoretically impossible and I'm familiar with the time travel theories, but would there be any other kind of effect similar to that of a sonic boom? 

Side question: Did they know that a sonic boom would occur when an object broke the sound barrier before they actually broke it?
gpt
There actually is such an effect in the right context, and it manifests as Cherenkov radiation.

In a vacuum, light travels at speed *c*.  In a transparent material, light will travel at a slower speed.  (This is what the index of refraction measures.)  Let's call that slower speed *v*.

If a charged particle travels in that transparent medium at speed greater than *v* but, of course, less than *c*, it will produce Cherenkov radiation, the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom.

Cherenkov radiation is key to certain detectors (for proton decay and neutrino observatory experiments like Super Kamiokande); they have large underground areas filled with water and detectors set up to detect any Cherenkov radiation, which would then indicate that certain particle physics phenomena had occurred.