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A team of researchers over at MIT might have just broken a new record. They’ve created “the world’s slowest fastest camera,” which is able to shoot one trillion frames per second. To put the speed into perspective: one trillion seconds is over 31,688 years. If you then take one second of footage on this camera, and played it back at 30 fps, it would still take you over 1,000 years to watch it, according to Wired.com. (If you decide to host that sort of movie night, please don’t invite us over.)
Led by Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, the team relied on this new technology called a “streak camera,” which, essentially, has a slit so narrow that only a thin slice of laser light can be seen at one time, according to ExtremeTech. The laser pulses are then picked up by an array of 500 sensors in the camera, and, with the use of mirrors, the camera’s angle of view is changed over time until each of these one-dimensional slices can be built up into a complete 2D image.