Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done the unthinkable. They’ve captured video at the speed of light, or, one trillion frames per second.

Basically, that’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.

We’ll let the scientists explain the theory behind it:

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionth of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second.

Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints.

Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nano-second long event.

Using a Titanium Sapphire laser that emits pulses at regular intervals every of 13 nanoseconds as their light source, they will compose images via pulses of light that illuminate the scene, and also trigger the picosecond-accurate streak tube which captures the light returned from the object being captured.

Here’s a video explaining it:

They have decided to call it Femto Photography, and it consists of femtosecond laser illumination – that’s one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth of a second.

[Source: MIT]