Skip to main content
WATCH: The world's blackest material just got even more black

Scientists can't even measure it.

Back in 2014, a team of British researchers made headlines for producing the blackest material known to science. Called Vantablack, the material was so black, it absorbed all but 0.035 percent of visible light, which means to our eyes, it was borderline invisible. Now the blackest material ever made is even more black, with the inventors announcing that no spectrometer in the world is powerful enough to measure how much light it absorbs.
So far, all we know about this record-breaking material is what's in the video above, filmed by the Vantablack inventors at Surrey NanoSystems just moments after they removed it from the reactor.
"It's resulted in a coating so black that our spectrometers can't measure it!" the team explains. "Even running a high power laser pointer across it barely reflects anything back to the viewer. We have never before made a material so 'black' that it can't be picked up on our spectrometers in the infrared."
So what exactly is Vantablack? While it might look like it, Vantablack isn't a paint, pigment, or fabric, but is actually a special coating made from millions of carbon nanotubes, each one measuring around 20 namometres - approximately 3,500 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair - by 14 to 50 microns. To put that in perspective, 1 nanometre equals 0.001 microns.
According to Surrey NanoSystems, a surface area of just 1 cm squared would contain around 1,000 million of these nanotubes. 
When light hits this arrangement, it enters the gaps between the nanotubes and is almost instantly absorbed as it bounces between them and can't escape. "The near total lack of reflectance creates an almost perfect black surface," say the researchers. "To understand this effect, try to visualise walking through a forest in which the trees are around 3 km tall instead of the usual 10 to 20 metres. It’s easy to imagine just how little light, if any, would reach you."
If that analogy set your imagination into overdrive, you're not the only one - the world's blackest material is set to revolutionise art, with internationally acclaimed sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor telling the BBC that a space coated in Vantablack would be unnerving, to say the least. "Imagine a space that's so dark that as you walk in, you lose all sense of where you are, what you are, and especially all sense of time," he said.
The only problem is that over the weekend, Kapoor announced that he's bought the exclusive rights to use Vantablack in his art, and other artists are not happy.
Now, in case you're still not convinced of the blackest black material's blackness, here's Vantablack's record-breaking blackness compared to other shades of black:


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This strange mineral grows on dead bodies and turns them blue

If you were to get up close and personal with Ötzi the Iceman – the 5,000-year-old mummy of a  tattooed ,  deep-voiced  man who died and was frozen in the Alps – you’d notice that his skin is flecked with tiny bits of blue. At first, it would appear that these oddly bluish crystal formations embedded in his skin are from freezing to death or some other sort of trauma, but it’s actually a mineral called  vivianite  (or blue ironstone) and it happens to form quite often on corpses left in iron-rich environments. For Ötzi, the patches of vivianite are  from him resting  near rocks with flecks of iron in them, but other cases are way more severe. According to Chris Drudge at Atlas Obscura , a man named John White was buried in a cast iron coffin back in 1861. During those days, coffins often had a window for grieving family members to peer inside even if the lid was closed during the funeral. Sometime after he was buried, that window broke, allow...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Official: Time Crystals Are a New State of Matter, and Now We Can Create Them

Peer-review has spoken. Earlier this year , physicists had put together a blueprint for how to make and measure time crystals - a bizarre state of matter with an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, allowing them to maintain constant oscillation without energy. Two separate research teams managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals  back in January,  and now both experiments have successfully passed peer-review for the first time, putting the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality. "We've taken these theoretical ideas that we've been poking around for the last couple of years and actually built it in the laboratory,"  says one of the researchers , Andrew Potter from Texas University at Austin. "Hopefully, this is just the first example of these, with many more to come." Time crystals  are one of the coolest things physics has dished up in recent months, because they point to a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Dark Side Of The Love Hormone Oxytocin

New research shows oxytocin isn't the anti-anxiety drug we thought it was. Oxytocin, the feel-good bonding hormone released by physical contact with another person, orgasm and childbirth (potentially encouraging  monogamy ), might have a darker side. The  love drug  also plays an important role in intensifying  negative emotional memories  and increasing feelings of fear in future stressful situations, according to a new study. Two experiments performed with mice found that the hormone activates a signaling molecule called extracellular-signal-related kinases (ERK), which has been associated with the way the brain  forms memories   of fear . According to Jelena Radulovic, senior author on the study and a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, ERK stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum, the region with the highest levels of oxytocin. Mice without oxytocin receptors and mice with even more oxytocin receptors tha...
Post a Comment
Read more