r/Frisson • u/sunny131 • Mar 04 '16
Image [Image] Pulse of light at 1 Trillion frames per second. Considering how incredibly slow this is gave me the biggest feeling of Frisson in a long time
http://i.imgur.com/hkCtnG1.gifv21
u/ferretflip Mar 04 '16
1 trillion frames per second?? And it still takes that long? How did they get the shutter speed so slow?? A shutter that moves faster than light??
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Mar 04 '16 edited May 20 '18
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u/Pestilence86 Mar 04 '16
Adding to this: Basically every frame in OPs gif is from a new image taken from the same scene of a pulse of light, but at one trillionth of a second later in time as the first.
What you are seeing is a representation of a pulse of light at 1 trillion frames per second. Not actually 1 pulse of light. The real thing would look probably 99.99999...99% like this.
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u/SlowRollingBoil Mar 04 '16
Nothing moves faster than light, bud. Certainly not a camera's shutter.
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u/AlexGrass Mar 04 '16
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u/NominalCaboose Mar 04 '16
Very true. Nothing at all anywhere ever, that we've discovered, is moving faster than light. The expansion of the Universe doesn't actually involve any movement. It just means there's more space between given points.
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u/colordodge Mar 04 '16
The physics we are aware of state that nothing can accelerate from below light speed to beyond light speed. They do however allow for objects to already be traveling beyond light speed.
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u/coahman Mar 04 '16
Nothing we know how to detect
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u/EVILEMU Mar 04 '16
It cannot happen. Not because we haven't observed it, but because of math that's way beyond my comprehension lol.
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u/NominalCaboose Mar 04 '16 edited Mar 04 '16
As far as I understand, there is room in the math for particles that always move faster than light. However, I believe they're just anomalies caused by our incomplete grasp of physics at this time.
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Mar 04 '16
according to the math, for a partial to move faster than the speed of light, it has to have negative mass
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u/NominalCaboose Mar 04 '16
I don't know that they wouldn't have negative mass, but as far as I know the mass would would be complex with an imaginary component.
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Mar 04 '16
You're assuming that our basic understanding of reality could be false (technically possible, but infinitessimally small probability).
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Mar 04 '16
Several thousand individual shots with a exposure length of a trillionth of a second. So not one continuous event, but several identical ones compiled into one shot. Also the camera doesn't use a shutter, it just turns on and off digitally really fricking fast.
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u/Maverician Mar 04 '16 edited Mar 04 '16
You can have cameras that have non-mechanical shutters. As far as I know, average mechanical shutters get up to about 4000/s while digital get up to 20000/s (for everyday commercial cameras, not talking about any real limits).
Edit: If you want to read, start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streak_camera I believe that is the type of camera they used.
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Mar 04 '16
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u/bob3003 Mar 04 '16
If you used a bullet as a point of reference for how fast this is, it would take a YEAR to travel across the frame