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

Einstein’s Lost Theory Describes a Universe Without a Big Bang

Einstein with Edwin Hubble, in 1931, at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, looking through the lens of the 100-inch telescope through which Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929.  Courtesy of the Archives, Calif Inst of Technology. In 1917, a year after Albert Einstein’s  general theory of relativity  was published—but still two years before he would become the international celebrity we know—Einstein chose to tackle the  entire universe . For anyone else, this might seem an exceedingly ambitious task—but this was Einstein. Einstein began by applying his  field equations of gravitation  to what he considered to be the entire universe. The field equations were the mathematical essence of his general theory of relativity, which extended Newton’s theory of gravity  to realms where speeds approach that of light and masses are very large. But his math was better than he wanted to believe—...
Post a Comment
Read more

There’s a Previously Undiscovered Organ in Your Body, And It Could Explain How Cancer Spreads

Ever heard of the interstitium? No? That’s OK, you’re not alone  —  scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what  —  you’ve got one! The interstitium is your newest organ. Scientists identified it for the first time because they are better able to observe living tissues at a microscopic scale, according to a recent study published  in  Scientific Reports , Scientists had long believed that connective tissue surrounding our organs was a thick, compact layer. That’s what they saw when they looked at it in the lab, outside the body, at least. But in a routine endoscopy (exploration of the gastrointestinal tract), a micro camera revealed something unexpected: When observed in a living body, the connective tissue turned out to be “an open, fluid-filled space supported by a lattice made of thick collagen bundles,” pathologist and study author Neil Theise  told  Research Gate . This network of channels is present throughout ...
Post a Comment
Read more

First light-bending calculator designed with metamaterials

Exotic materials that bend light in extreme ways could be used to perform complex mathematical operations, creating a new kind of analogue computer. Tools for manipulating light waves have taken off in recent years thanks to the development of  metamaterials . These materials have complex internal structures on scales smaller than the wavelength of the light they interact with, and so they produce unusual effects. Most famously, metamaterials promise to deliver " invisibility cloaks " that can route light around an object, making it seem to disappear. Nader Engheta  at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues decided to explore a different use for metamaterials, one that adapts the  old idea of analogue computing . Today's digital computers are based on electrical switches that are either on or off. But before these machines were analogue computers based on varying electrical or mechanical properties. The  slide rule  is one example...
Post a Comment
Read more