Scientists Use 100 Billion FPS Camera to Capture Lights Sonic Boom
When an object breaks the sound barrieraccelerates to the point where its moving faster than the speed of soundit creates pressure waves that result in what is called a sonic boom and Mach cone. Now, scientists have managed to captured a similar phenomenon for light itself.
In case youve never seen it, this is what it looks like when a fighter jet breaks the sound barrier. That cone is called a Mach cone, signifying that the aircraft just exceeded Mach 1:
Scientists have known that light does something similar when moving from a medium where it is slowed down (like glass) into open air where it can move at full speed, but nobody had yet managed to capture this so-called photonic Mach cone on camera. Until Jinyang Liang and his team at Washington University in St. Louis, that is.
The breakthrough is not to be taken lightly. The speed of sound is approximately 340 meters per second; the speed of light, by comparison, is a blistering 3.0 x 10^8 meters per second. So how the heck do you capture something that fast on camera?
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https://petapixel.com/2017/01/23/scientists-use-100-billion-fps-camera-capture-lights-sonic-boom/
A real photon torpedo!