YouTubers filmed the speed of light at 10 trillion frames per second
If you like your science-y or geeky stuff, you might have heard of the Slow Mo Guys.
They've built up a pretty big rep on YouTube, and more recently TikTok, putting everything in slow motion from how the Nintendo Zapper works to spinning laser discs.
This time they've gone all out with the fastest of all speeds: the speed of light.
Whilst that might sound impossible, it can be done with some pretty impressive technology.
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Typically, the Slow Mo Guys film at half a million frames per second, but this is not nearly fast enough to capture light in motion.
This is where the researchers at CalTech come in.
The team's Compressed Ultrafast Photography department and a camera make the Slow Mo Guys' setup look totally small in comparison.
For one, their camera, known as the T-CUP, can shoot at 10 trillion frames per second, making it capable of putting any fast-moving object into slow motion.
'Now, we've filmed at some very high frame rates. We're talking up to about half a million, which is not to be sniffed at,' explained one of the Slow-Mo Guys host.
'Their camera puts ours to shame and does 10 trillion frames per second. For reference, that is 20 million times faster than the fastest we've ever filmed on this channel.'
Using the T-CUP, the Slow Mo Guys set out to film a laser beam as it passed through a milk bottle.
And why a milk bottle, you ask?
Well, the milk inside scatters the laser light, making it visible as it zips from one end of the bottle to the other in roughly 2,000 picoseconds.
To put that into perspective, that's faster than a blink of an eye, according to the YouTubers.
The result worked as intended and captured the laser light moving through the bottle, making it appear as a strange blue slime.
'On the bottle video, the light seems to have gained the same speed so you’ve got to remember that the scale of this is much smaller,' added one of the Slow Mo guys, Gavin Free.
'This distance here is one millimetre, whereas before it was the entire bottle, which shows you that we’re actually capturing light travelling through such a small amount of space and it’s so slow now that our picosecond has a decimal place to the hundredths femtosecond.'
And this is not just a video for pure entertainment either.
Lihong Wang, one of the camera's creators, along with other CalTech scientists are hopeful that they could eventually create a camera capable of capturing up to one quadrillion frames per second.
Wang described that this kind of technology could do wonders for future research in understanding the human body, potentially allowing us to see tissues, including detailed images of the brain.