When an object moves near the speed of light, everyday intuitions about space and time begin to break down. This is a key outcome of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. At such extreme speeds, an object’s length appears contracted, and time itself behaves differently for the moving object than for a stationary observer. These effects have been confirmed through numerous experiments.

Yet one fascinating prediction of relativity has long remained elusive: the Terrell-Penrose effect. Proposed independently by James Terrell and Roger Penrose in 1959, it suggests that fast-moving objects should appear visually rotated, not merely contracted. Despite its theoretical foundation, the effect had never been observed—until now.

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Researchers from TU Wien and the University of Vienna have succeeded in replicating this optical illusion for the first time using laser pulses and high-speed imaging. Although actual objects cannot be accelerated to near-light speed in a lab, the team devised a clever workaround: they mimicked light-speed effects at a dramatically reduced "effective" speed of just 2 meters per second. Their findings are published in Communications Physics.

To understand the principle, consider a rocket traveling at 90% the speed of light. Due to Lorentz contraction, it would appear roughly 2.3 times shorter along the direction of motion. But this shortening can’t be captured in a conventional photograph. Light from various parts of the rocket takes different amounts of time to reach a camera, meaning that what we see is not a simple snapshot, but a combination of light emitted at different moments.

Imagine the object is a cube. Light from the front corner and the back corner reaches the eye at the same time, but because the rear light had farther to travel, it was emitted earlier—when the cube was in a different position. This mismatch in timing creates the illusion that the cube has been rotated. The visual distortion arises not only from length contraction but also from the staggered arrival of light from different parts of the object.

Though imperceptible in ordinary scenarios—such as photographing a fast-moving car—this effect becomes significant at relativistic speeds. Unfortunately, we lack the means to launch rockets fast enough to see it directly. To get around this, Professor Peter Schattschneider’s team devised a method using laser pulses and high-speed cameras to simulate how light behaves under relativistic constraints.

By carefully choreographing the motion of a cube and a sphere and recording the timing of laser reflections from various points, students Victoria Helm and Dominik Hornof recreated a scenario where light behaved as though it were traveling at only 2 meters per second. This allowed them to simulate how an object would appear if it were moving near the actual speed of light.

The trick lies in incorporating time into the image composition. While it’s easy to stitch together panoramic views from spatial data, the team innovatively added a temporal dimension. They constructed images by selecting points on the object that would have been illuminated at precise moments, mimicking the behavior of light under extreme conditions. The result is a still image showing the Terrell-Penrose effect for the first time—making a long-standing prediction of relativity finally visible.