The blackest material ever made came about recently. It is Vantablack, first developed in 2014. It absorbs 99.8% of light. It is made of carbon nanotubes. These are rods of carbon that are much thinner than any human hair and so close together in a maze-like matrix that light goes in and can't escape. The name is a compound of the acronym VANTA (vertically aligned nanotube arrays).
When light strikes Vantablack, instead of bouncing off, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected amongst the tubes, eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat.
People have since become fascinated by how strange the supposed colour is. It creates the optical illusion of flattening features and rendering objects two-dimensional.
Here's one writer's summary: "My colleague Mark Wilson saw a sample of Vantablack and found it deeply unsettling. “It has no reflection, no contours,” he writes. “It’s like part of the world has been Photoshopped away.”
Vantablack made its space debut aboard a satellite in low-Earth orbit, where it absorbs stray light so the camera systems can image Earth more effectively. There's a video HERE.
Scientists who discovered the material worked with artist Diet Strebe and coated a radiant 16.78-carat yellow diamond worth $2 million. The diamond is considered the most brilliant material on earth. I don't know what it was worth after it was coated, but its brilliance is now invisible.
Where can you find Vantablack now? The BMW X6 Series car. Vantablack isn't a pigment or a paint, so you can't buy a bucket of it and paint your walls or the car. The nanotubes have to be grown in the Surrey NonSystems lab. It can take 2 days to apply to an object. So I wonder how long it took to cover a car?
It wasn't really covered in the labs. It was covered in a variant VBx2. The article calls it a super black, non-reflective paint, so it couldn't have been coated in the lab. I wondered things like how you would find the door to open it - there is a little silver dot in the picture. And what would happen when dust and mud got on it.
I found one outdoor image - all the rest are in studios. It looks like velvet to me.
I found this sculpture at Rodman Hall in St. Catharines - It is "The Race" by William McElcheran. His sculptures are sprinkled around downtown Toronto's financial district. They too are in the dark and eerie range of experience.
