With the help of a high-speed camera, scientists managed to capture the movement of the fastest particles in the Universe – photons of light. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has created a camera that can shoot one trillion frames per second, which is almost 42 billion times faster than a conventional movie camera, which is 24 frames per second.
Light really moves like a wave. The video shows an experimental filming of the movement of photons in water at a speed of 966 million km/h. In real time, this lasted a nanosecond. For comparison, a nanosecond is related to a second in the same way that a second is related to 31.7 years. The human eye cannot detect the movement of an object at this speed, so the camera slowed down the footage to 20 seconds.
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