So even if our exposure time is indeed nearly a trillionth of a second, to get sufficient light we must take an average.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners

So what about in a trillionth of a second?

CNN: A camera that can see around corners

This X-ray laser was aimed at a piece of aluminum foil, and in less than a trillionth of a second, the laser heated the foil up to 2 million degrees celsius (3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit).

FORBES: Scientists Build The World's Most Powerful Laser

Brief exposure to high levels of PCBs and dioxins may cause skin lesions and affect the liver (the tolerated daily intake for dioxin is about 1 picogram - one trillionth of a gram - per kg body weight).

CNN: THE GREAT DIOXIN SCARE

But its main purpose is serious: to reveal the large-scale structure of the universe and thus uncover what happened in the first billion-trillion-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang to cause things to turn out the way they did.

ECONOMIST: The Sloan star survey

We call this new imaging technology femto photography because we capture a segment of the image with a flashlight (in this case, a laser pulse) on for a few millionths of a billionth of a second (or a few femtoseconds) and an exposure time approaching a trillionth of a second.

CNN: A camera that can see around corners