However hard you stare, you would still miss it. Researchers have found a way to generate the shortest-ever flash of light - 80 attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second) long.
Such flashes have already been used to capture an image of a laser pulse too short to be "photographed" before.
The light pulses are produced by firing longer, but still very short laser pulses into a cloud of neon gas. The laser gives a kick of energy to the neon atoms, which then release this energy in the form of brief pulses of extreme ultraviolet light.
The trigger pulses fired at the neon cloud are themselves only 2.5 femtoseconds, billionths of a millionth of a second, long, says team member Eleftherios Goulielmakis at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.
Read the rest: Fastest-ever flashgun captures image of light wave.
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