If I were a supervillain , I ’d desire my name to be Vantablack . Unfortunately , that soubriquet is already conduct , but not by a Hollywood bad guy cable . No , its proprietor is even more dark and mysterious : Vantablack is the sullen material ever made .
make by a British company called Surrey NanoSystems , Vantablack suck all but 0.035 percent of visible light . It is grow on sheets of aluminum transparency and consists of a bunch of microscopic carbon copy nanotubes so tightly packed together that abstemious particles ca n’t escape . " Take one of the whisker on your caput , ” Ben Jensen , the principal technical officer of Surrey NanoSystems , explain toThe Guardian . “ Split that hair 10,000 time and one of the strands that you take away is the size of the tubes that we grow . "
This material is so dark , it removes all texture from the control surface to which it is hold . Human eyes do n’t really know what to make of it . Here ’s how Jensenexplainswhat Vantablack does to crumpled Al foil : " You expect to see the mound and all you’re able to see … it ’s like black , like a hole , like there ’s nothing there . It just see so strange . "
The optic nothingness Vantablack produces reminds me of thePortable Holesfrom Wile E. Coyote animated cartoon . Indeed , Stephen Westland , prof of color science and technology at Leeds University , toldThe Independentthat the material is “ almost as close to a black gob as we could imagine . "
So , why make something so dark ? Vantablack will be used to aid calibrate space cameras and scope . allot toJensen,“it reduces isolated - light source , improving the ability of sensitive telescopes to see the faintest genius . ” And the armed services will no doubt require to get its hands on Vantablack for stealth mathematical process , but Surrey NanoSystems is keeping restrained about that . It is also coy about disclosing Vantablack ’s price , butsaysit ’s “ very expensive . ”
(TRY TO) SEE FOR YOURSELF
For the next four month , Vantablack will beon display in Londonat the Science Museum .
