If I were a supervillain, I’d want my name to be Vantablack. Unfortunately, that moniker is already taken, but not by a Hollywood bad guy. No, its owner is even more dark and mysterious: Vantablack is the darkest material ever made.
Created by a British company called Surrey NanoSystems, Vantablack absorbs all but 0.035 percent of visible light. It is grown on sheets of aluminum foil and consists of a bunch of microscopic carbon nanotubes so tightly packed together that light particles can’t escape. “Take one of the hairs on your head,” Ben Jensen, the chief technical officer of Surrey NanoSystems, explained to The Guardian. “Split that hair 10,000 times and one of the strands that you take away is the size of the tubes that we grow.”
via Mental Floss
