(Photo: University of Tokyo)
Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Keio University have developed a camera that can capture movement faster than ever before. It’s called the Sequentially Timed All-optical Mapping Photography or STAMP. The optical shutter is capable of photographing an object at 4,400,000,000,000 frames per second. That’s 1,000 times faster than any other camera.
The STAMP is fast enough to even see heat conducting, which is about one-sixth of the speed of light. How can it do this? Chris Higgins explains in Wired:
The current leading brand of high-speed real-time recording is a method unfortunately known as the pump-probe process, where light is "pumped" at the subject and then "probed" for absorption. STAMP differs from this by skipping the need to constantly probe, or measure, the scene to construct an image, instead it uses single-shot bursts to acquire images and maps the spatial profile of the subject to the temporal profile at a 450x450-pixel resolution.
-via Lawrence E. Forbes