Well, we've finally cracked it. Scientists have
finally figured out how to paint a portal to another dimension, as prophesied
by Loony Tunes' the
Roadrunner. Who wants to try driving a (very small) truck right through
that gaping void circle?
In all seriousness, what you're looking at isn't
actually a portal to another dimension - but it's not Photoshop, either. That
really is a physical object that's been sprayed with Vantablack -
the blackest material known to science. If you're not familiar with Vantablack,
it was invented by British researchers back
in 2014, and soon after, it was declared the
darkest material ever produced in the lab, capable of absorbing 99.96
percent of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light.
Since then, the team behind the invention - from
Surrey NanoSystems - has upped its blackness, and
in early 2016, announced that no spectrometer in the world was powerful
enough to measure how much light it absorbs.
"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." the researchers explain in a
YouTube video.
In order to make this thing more marketable, the
team has now released a 'spray-on' form, which isn't quite as black - it only blocks 99.8 percent of
ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light - but that's enough to make
three-dimensional objects appear distinctly two-dimensional.
Just look at this thing, it's legitimately
unnerving:
So how does it actually work?
In its original, blackest form, 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 nanometres (roughly 3,500 times smaller than a human
hair) by 14 to 50 microns. To put that in perspective, 1 nanometre equals
0.001 microns. So a surface area of Vantablack measuring just 1 cm squared
would contain around 1,000 million of these tiny nanotubes.
When light hits this arrangement, it enters the gaps
between the nanotubes, and is almost instantly trapped and absorbed as it
bounces between them.
"The near total lack of reflectance creates an
almost perfect black surface, 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." say the researchers.
Vantablack is so dark, it's almost impossible for
the human eye to perceive it - we need some order of reflected light for our
brains to be able to process what's in front of us. As a result, the team says
the observer's ability to perceive gets confused, and some people say
looking at Vantablack is like looking into a
bottomless hole. Their new spray-on version, called Vantablack
S-VIS, now allows them to apply Vantablack to much larger objects, which
means there really is a possibility of stealth
jets being painted in the stuff.
Here's what it looks like when sprayed on a
three-dimensional face mask, rendering all the features non-existent to our eyes:
And here's another one of that spherical object,
because holy crap:
If you're wondering how to get your hands on some of
this stuff, unfortunately, it's not
available to paint your car in, but if you work at a university or museum,
you might just be able to get a sample.
For the rest of us, we'll just have to marvel at this miracle of modern science
from a distance.
Here's a comparison of regular black paint and
Vantablack, just in case you still weren't convinced that it really is possible
to create something that's quite literally blacker than black:
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