Vantablack is the world's blackest black material

New York

VANTABLACK is the world's blackest black. It's so black that 3-D objects coated in the material are visually reduced to mere silhouettes. A crumpled piece of tinfoil, for example, looks like a vast abyss. That's because the material absorbs more than 99.965 per cent of light.

"It's the blackest material in the universe after black holes," the British sculptor Anish Kapoor once said. "It's a physical thing that you cannot see."

Not a paint or a pigment, Vantablack is the creation of Surrey Nanosystems, a tiny company located on Britain's southern coast, which initially developed it for the aerospace industry in collaboration with Britain's National Physics Laboratory.

The near-weightless, high-tech material is made from carbon nanotubes, each one-millionth of a millimetre thick, grown in a clean room using proprietary technology. The tubes in original Vantablack - there are now two versions - are 10,000 times as lon…