The researchers discovered that Rayleigh waves travel through the skin and bone layers, which the body's touch receptor cells pick up and send the message to the brain.
They used mathematical models of touch receptors to show how it responds to the Rayleigh waves, which could vary on different species. Still, the wavelength's rate remains the same based on receptor depth, enabling the universal law to be defined.
Study lead author Dr. Tom Montenegro-Johnson from the School of Mathematics of the University of Birmingham said that touch is an essential primordial sense and the most complex, making it the least understood of the senses.
"For example, if you indent the skin of a rhinoceros by 5mm, they would have the same sensation as a human with a similar indentation - it's just that the forces required to produce the indentation would be different," Andrews said.