In a breakthrough study, scientists have created the world's fastest 2-D camera, able to capture up to 100 billion frames per second.

The device beats out all other receive-only ultrafast techniques on the market, which are limited by on-chip storage and electronic readout speed to operations of about 10 million frames per second.

And this is no ordinary Kodak or Cannon camera. A team at the University of Washington in St. Louis used a technique called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) that allows them to make movies out of their shot images using four physical phenomena: laser pulse reflection, refraction, faster-than light propagation of what is called non-information, and photon racing in two media.

"For the first time, humans can see light pulses on the fly," lead researcher Lihong Wang said in a statement.

Wang and his colleagues hope that their innovation may lead to new scientific discoveries, particularly in the fields of biomedicine, astronomy and forensics. For example, the camera's advanced imaging frame rate could be used to detect diseases, analyze activity occurring in supernovas located light-years away, or monitor the movements of thousands of pieces of space junk currently whirling around our atmosphere, potentially causing catastrophic collisions in a real life "Gravity."

"Because this technique advances the imaging frame rate by orders of magnitude, we now enter a new regime to open up new visions," Wang added.

The camera is a series of devices that may one day work with high-powered microscopes and telescopes to capture complex natural and physical phenomena, and not just your average picture of a flower or family reunion.

CUP photographs an object with a specialty camera lens, which takes the photons from the object and brings them to a tiny apparatus called a digital micromirror device (DMD), smaller than a dime. Despite its small size, it holds about one million micromirrors, each one used to encode the image and, through a complex process, convert time to space. What's more, all this happens in a matter of only five nanoseconds (one nanosecond is a billionth of a second).

The process that has led to the world's fastest 2-D camera is described in further detail in the journal Nature.

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