There's a material so black it absorbs nearly all the light that hits it

Some blacks are blacker than others — and one is so black it barely looks real. Vantablack, developed by the British firm Surrey NanoSystems, absorbs about 99.965% of the visible light that strikes it, reflecting back almost nothing.

The effect on the eye is uncanny. Coat a crumpled sheet of foil in Vantablack and the wrinkles vanish; the brain, starved of the reflected light it uses to read shape and depth, sees only a flat black hole where a solid object sits. A bumpy, three-dimensional thing becomes a featureless silhouette — your eyes insist they are looking at a void, even when you know there’s a curved surface right in front of you.

The secret is a forest of carbon nanotubes — the name stands for Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays. Each tube is far thinner than a wavelength of light, and they stand packed together like an impossibly dense field of grass. When a ray enters the forest it bounces from tube to tube, getting absorbed and converted to a trace of heat with almost no chance of escaping back out. Light checks in, but it doesn’t check out.

Vantablack wasn’t made as a novelty. It was built for a practical reason: lining the insides of telescopes and space instruments to swallow stray reflections that would otherwise drown out the faint signals astronomers are hunting for.

Its crown didn’t last. In 2019, engineers at MIT unveiled a carbon-nanotube coating that captures at least 99.995% of incoming light — blacker still, and discovered partly by accident. The hunt for the perfect black, it turns out, keeps getting darker.