New camera captures images at 100 billion frames per second

Slow-motion photography is cool and all, but now a team of scientists has decided to use high-speed photography to track light as it travels through space. In this GIF, you’re looking at a pulse of light hitting and bouncing off of a mirror. Really. The researchers, based in Washington University in St. Louis, have used a technique called Compressed Ultrafast Photography (CUP) to chase the light at 100 billion frames per second. 

If you’re wondering what scientists can do with a camera that captures 100 billion frames per second, you’re not alone. We’ve already got ​cameras that can film bullets as they burst through an apple, and ​watching high frames-per-second videos online is a pastime of many. So, what happens when you improve on existing cameras by several orders of magnitude? Lots of things, it turns out. You can watch light move—and you can watch it go through and around objects, which is quite important when you want to eventually cloak them. “It might be possible to improve the investigation into approaches to optical cloaking, in which light bends or is deformed around an object, instead of going through it,” Brian Pogue, an engineer at Darthmouth, ​wrote of the breakthrough in Nature.