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ColeSloth on September 15th, 2019 at 02:15 UTC »
It sucks that seeing pictures of any of this stuff on the internet is near pointless compared to what seeing it in person must be like.
redmercuryvendor on September 15th, 2019 at 00:17 UTC »
I love that the authors just drop that in there, and never mention it again.
JumpyPlug15 on September 14th, 2019 at 18:52 UTC »
I'm not an expert in this field, all this info is just off the top of my head and I may be mistaken. Please feel free to correct me.
How is this useful?
Dark materials not only look cool, they're functional too.
One of the most common use cases is in telescopes in space and on Earth used to detect exoplanets. These telescopes rely on detecting the brightness of stars over time. When planets orbiting the stars pass between the telescope and the star, it blocks some of the star's light and the relative brightness the telescope sees drops. If this happens regularly, we know that the star has something darker than itself blocking some of the light. This method is called transit photometry.
These telescopes and detectors need to be extremely sensitive because stars are normally way bigger than planets, so the drop in brightness is extremely subtle. Therefore, any interference from other light sources in space (like the Sun) will immediately ruin the observation, which is why light proofing is a huge deal in these experiments.
How does the material work?
Again, I'm not an expert on the subject, but the material seems to be a layer of carbon nanotubes on the surface of the material (Think fur, but a lot more dense and black). As the photons enter the "forest" of tubes, they get lost and have a hard time getting to the object and exiting the forest if they do manage to reflect off the object.How was it created?
It was made by accident. The team was apparently trying to find an improved way to manufacture carbon nanotubes on surface like aluminum foil, which oxidize in the air pretty easily. This is bad because it means that there is a layer of oxides between the foil and the nanotubes. To get around the oxidization, they soaked the foil in saltwater, then moved it to an oxygen-free environment to keep new oxides from forming. The result was the tangled mess of carbon nanutubes with abnormally high omnidirectional blackbody photoabsorption (it absorbs a bunch of light from all angles).Media summary :
There's a new blackest material ever, and it's eating a diamond as we speak