Popping a bubble on a body of water seems like an unspectacular event, but there’s real beauty in what happens if you look at it carefully. For James Bird at Harvard University, that meant filming the exploding bubbles with a high-speed camera. His beautiful videos reveal that contrary to popular belief, a popped bubble doesn’t just vanish. Instead, it gives birth to a ring of smaller daughter bubbles, each of which can produce an even smaller ring when it bursts.

The bubble’s curved nature means that the air inside it is at a higher pressure than air outside it. When a hole forms in the bubble, this pressure difference disappears and the film starts to recedes away. The film experiences an