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Scientists Have Developed a Material So Dark That You Can't See It
gbjbaanb writes A British company is developing a new material that's so black it absorbs all but 0.035 percent of the visual light, making it the darkest material ever created. Of course, apart from making album covers, it conducts heat 7 times better than copper and is 10 times stronger than steel. "The nanotube material, named Vantablack, has been grown on sheets of aluminium foil by the Newhaven-based company. While the sheets may be crumpled into miniature hills and valleys, this landscape disappears on areas covered by it. 'You expect to see the hills and all you can see it's like black, like a hole, like there's nothing there. It just looks so strange,' said Ben Jensen, the firm's chief technical officer.
And I took a photo of the material.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
but you can still see the void it leaves behind
It's the weird colour scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labeled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. Hey, what is this, some kind of galactic hyper-hearse?
Bet it can be seen just fine in the far infrared.
As a color, this is called fuligin (from Gene Wolde's New Sun series).
And the answer is none. None more black.
The helicopters hovering over my house.
Have gnu, will travel.
I hear a Mr. Hotblack Desiato wants to buy all of it. The material and the team that invented it... He also might buy the whole solar system while he's at it.
It's what the executioners wear.
So it's like staring into hyperspace?
Mostly random stuff.
Daily Mail
Can't remember if he got them from Acme or not...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I think her soul is made out of this material.
I moderated /. (emitted my energy). But the world is not more enlightened, because I was counter-moderated (anti-doesn't-matter). We may need this device/material to more accurately graph our lack of enlightenment, given the energy (carbon) submitted. Already available, BTW, on /. beta.
Gently reply
If this stuff where painted around the entrance of a curved tunnel and sun light shone on to it, if you you could only see the painted material then you would most 100% definitively see sunlight shining off of it.
Bright daylight being 10,000 foot candles and 1 candle light being something that we can see, 0.035% = 2,857 to 1 ratio.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
No pictures of the material under ambient lighting with other recognizable objects or this is vapor.
Your Flagship is ready after its respray.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
Very funny. Here are the real pictures: (maybe it's not to late to add this link to the article?)
http://sageofquay.blogspot.nl/
Polar Bear in a snow storm, then....
I imagine it would also be appropriate for the Batmobile.
Since she went all Goth, she claimed she was only wearing black till they invented something darker.
She'll wallow in this.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This needs to be made into a ninja suit.
As I recall, the protagonist in "The Shadow of The Torturer" wears a costume and cape made of a perfect black material so that all you see when he walks towards you is an irregular shifting black shape of perfect darkness.
With an axe, and eyes.
It was a good book. The rest of the series? Eh.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It is so happens that in computer graphics 3d object can be flat shaded, as a uniform color. In this case it is impossible to distinquish some characteristics and the object looks unnatural. So I believe I totally understand how the object should look. however we are used to unrealistic stuff in PC screen, however wrong looking objects in real life would be something really interesting.
This is going to be useful for the insides of optical systems, lens hoods, and such. Other than that, probably not that significant.
Douglas Adams wants it back ... assuming you can find it.
Then there are the military uses that the material's maker, Surrey NanoSystems, is not allowed to discuss.
They will make big money in military applications.
Build a monolith covered withthe stuff. Sounds about how it is described in the books.
I Don't Work Here
This is the sort of material which could be used for artificial hearts for lawyers, bankers, and politicians.
is how this may make my e-ink display better. ;)
How about non-visible spectrum absorption?
Or orange, blue, green. They'll never be able to market it unless they figure out what users want.
Imagine the surreal experience of opening a door to a room painted floor to ceiling with vantablack and only a small area rug serving as an "island" with a wing chair, ottoman and side table with table lamp floating in space, I can only wonder if you'd get a floating sensation while sitting in the chair.
Another, more cynical part of me suspects that our Government's Intelligence community is already planning on creating such rooms to "enhance" interrogation or make solitary confinement more solitary.
That can't be good for your eyes.
Blacker than the blackest black, times infinity.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Do I make the His Dark Materials joke, or the fuligin joke?
"Well, I just assumed!"
I wonder if this has applications in solar power. If you have 100% of light absorbed, the energy has to go somewhere - presumably it heats up.
Where can I buy it?
is serious trouble now
Should make for some great YouTube videos. Maybe with a flat speaker under it with someone yelling for help.
How long before Neil Gaiman has a t-shirt made of it?
You're just jealous 'cuz the voices talk to *me*
Dice needs to acquire this stuff right now to iron out the wrinkles in their slashdot beta site!!
Mick Jagger developed this in the '60s, before he became a specialist in historical cryptography :
Paint it Black
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
My evil black cat is far darker than that. She is a sink of evil, absorbing all light in a room. If she were much blacker I'd suspect I'd have a tame black hole living with me before, jumping up onto my bed, waking me up to be petted, and then proceeding to try to bite me. Things just don't get blacker than that!
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
This could be really interesting to use in thermal solar panels (in layman terms: the ones for water heating, not the ones to get electricity). If it absorbs so much light, it's probably more efficient than other materials, and surely much more than black paint. This could raise the efficiency of thermal panels to near 95%, so I hope this becomes a thing.
I wouldn't cover a car with it, though. I don't want to experience a solar oven first-hand.
It is useful not only for insides. It will also help with cooling in a vacuum system. For instance to get rid of the heat, which builds up inside satellites and to radiate the heat out into empty space.
It could prove useful in a thermal solar power plant to produce even higher temperatures.
It is possible the absorption spectrum of the material goes beyond the visible spectrum, or, that it can be modified to work in a different spectrum, and thereby be used for more than just optical systems.
But it does not have to be used for high-tech applications only. Just put some pipes onto your roof, coat the pipes with this material and run water through them. You will get a lot more warm and hot water in your house without paying extra for it.
"No idea. Not a bloody clue. Maybe there was a party at the zoo, and a monkey fucked a fish"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1478964/
Well not really but if you put a disk of this stuff on any object it'll look like it has a hole to hell in it.
could be interesting....
Science-fiction comes true. Sort of. Jack London (better known for "The Call of the Wild") published a story in 1903 entitled "The Shadow and the Flash," online here. The plot in part turns on the concept of a perfectly black pigment. It is a good story--much better than you'd guess from a summary. As to the optics London was either confused or exercising creative license:
"'Color is a sensation," he was saying.... 'Without light, we can see neither colors nor objects themselves. All objects are black in the dark, and in the dark it is impossible to see them. If no light strikes upon them, then no light is flung back from them to the eye, and so we have no vision-evidence of their being.' "But we see black objects in daylight," I objected. 'Very true,' he went on warmly. 'And that is because they are not perfectly black. Were they perfectly black, absolutely black, as it were, we could not see them ... with the right pigments, properly compounded, an absolutely black paint could be produced which would render invisible whatever it was applied to.'"
Uh, no. But it sounds plausible. Wonderful descriptive touches: "When you are near me I have feelings similar to those produced by dank warehouses, gloomy crypts, and deep mines. And as sailors feel the loom of the land on dark nights, so I think I feel the loom of your body."
Two brothers who feel sibling rivalry to a homicidal degree, are both amateur scientists with private laboratories. (Well, OF COURSE they are, who isn't?) They decide to seek the secret of invisibility, one by developing a perfectly black pigment, the other by becoming perfectly transparent. Both methods are flawed. The title refers to the flaws. The brother who paints himself with perfectly black paint, unfortunately, still casts a shadow. The brother who becomes transparent, apparently does not refract light but does disperse it (???), so intermittently evokes bright rainbow-colored flashes.
It is a much better story than it sounds from that description.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Defeatable by dust or spray paint?
Sadly, it will not. Displays could certainly profit from this material if the blackness could be turned on and off, which it cannot.
It is possible to use it as the background for an LED display, but these do not suffer from a lack of blackness, but the reflectivity of the LED layer and the top protective layer are the bigger problem. This new and super-black material would not help much, but only drive the production cost of the displays high up.
While it might do a good job at absorbing it must still emit blackbody photons.
True, but almost nothing at 300K, and almost none of that in the *near* infra-red.
Man, I'd love that stuff cooling my LEDs! The tiniest bit of airflow over something like that would be all one needs to keep even intense arrays like the MK-R cool.
I wonder if this could be grown on the backside of an MCPCB, negating the need for a heat sink and allowing just a fan over it to cool.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Nigel Tufnel: "It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black."
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
I piss off bigots.
OTOH, that would make a _great_ meditation chamber. :-)
... oh wait.
Can I use it to line the inner surface of my telescope?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
hitting this stuff?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
and lawyers are likely on their way to the Newhaven lab as we speak.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If the material comes down in price, it would be great for solar thermal receivers.
If you did high-school physics you may have heard about black body radiation and a thing called a black box - a box that absorbs all light that enters it. This could be a box with a hole in it lined with light-absorbing material, such that any light entering the hole never goes out again. That hole is essentially "black" and can be very, very black indeed. It can be so black, that your mind can play tricks on you as to what it is. This experience occurred to me at work in the, ahem, Gent's, with a toilet roll dispenser. For months, this dispenser (one of those that is stainless steel and holds two rolls, one above the other) had a matt black plastic cover on the front about where a lock was supposed to be, (you can see where this is going). It was absolutely a solid black plastic cover. Quite boring, but clearly covering a hole for some reason. One day, while waiting for nature to, err, take its course I poked the cover and in a flash, found it was a hole! It was a stunning realization that this plastic thing I'd been staring at for months, every day, was actually, nothing. I've subsequently checked this many times and it's an extremely good black box because even when I knew what it was, it still looked like a solid cover. Sadly, last week the facilities folks filled it up with a new lock and ruined a great physical phenomenon. It will be sadly missed.
E-ink is basically an array of black and white particles, simulating the old duotone process, that flip between having a white or black paticle flipped to the prominant position, caused by a charge between the top and bottom surfaces. These are aligned in little 8x8 grids, I believe, creating the perception of greyscale. Most of the newer panels have a front-light, that aims down and is reflected back by a reflective back surface layer. Having the black beads being made of less reflective material, may improve the contrast, somewhat, or the leakage may go unaffected.
YES, ladies and gentlemen, Science is once again showing us still more things that aren't there. Darwinism, when everyone knows we didn't come from apes; that the world is millions of years old when it's actually only around 7,000, and now this -- stuff that's supposedly there that only atheists can see.
... OUCH! My nose!
Well then "Mr. Scientist", let me walk right thru it and show more of your meaningless predictions that are actually worthl
Yeah, well, I can only dream this'll be on the 700 Club's "Science is Evil" Show next week.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
So how come a Google search for this comes up with zero technical/industry/science news sites?
That said, I fully believe that an end on view of a stack of nanotubes should be extremely dark.
Credo sim. - I think I am.
Or as Gene Wolfe called it in The Book of the New Sun, "Fuligin, the color that is darker than black." And since Wolfe didn't make up any new words, that means "fuligin" is a real word from some older time.
Forget little cocktail dresses... this is for NINJAS!
I get the feeling that if you were to brush those little tubes off of the surface they were grown on they'd make asbestos seem like candy floss in comparison!
It would be interesting to look at at night, as I suspect it would be darker than most shadows.
Nothing to see here. Move along please.
Or even the Daily Heil!....
racist gits
Goths of the world rejoice!
*clicks link* *looks at photo of material*
I can see it.
A tin foil hat that also makes you disappear!
and bury it in the moon...
Time for Disaster Area to build a stunt ship out of it...
Are they in violation of copyright law if they call it that, though? Somebody call Gene . . . .
Finally! Portable holes, like in the old Warners Brothers cartoons!
Proverbs 21:19
How long until I can get a racing bicycle frame made of this stuff?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I don't understand the comment about album covers. Do manufacturers use dark material for their photo albums? I'm confused.
A Kardashian is already trying to marry it.
...if "Hot Black" Desiato doesn't beat me to it.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
Let me know when they grow it on my aluminum tin foil hat. i will be doubly protected.
It reminds me of the creatures from the movie "Attack The Block". They were dog-like creatures whose fur was so black they were almost shapeless.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1478964/
I want to see this painted on stairs. It would remove all sense of depth. I bet it would be really odd to watch somebody walk up them. Heck, an escalator would be cool to. Imagine what something like this could do for live theater, rides at Disney, etc. Also imagine what it would be like to be in a room with all surfaces covered in this material - seeing someone laying on a bed or sitting in a chair...
So I could have a new suit and not have to suck in my stomach.
We could also construct a large black Monolith in orbit that would scare the shit out of any alien invaders.
[Zaphod] Yeah, that really is bad for the eyes!
[Ford] It's so black! You can hardly see it. Light just falls into it.
Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
According to wikipedia , normal black paint reflects 2.5%, making it 97.5% efficient, according to this metric. Going to 99.99xx is an insignificant improvement compared to the cost of ordinary black paint and this new stuff. I doubt highly that the bottleneck is in the reflectivity of the coating.
Ultimate Ninja suit in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
I guess since it conducts heat well it won't go poof like this earlier material:
http://www.scientificamerican....
The company made 150 000 sheets of it; but that's hard to verify; since they can't find it in the basement.
And in other news, Spinal Tap will be reissuing "Smell the Glove"