Vantablack: The blackest material on Earth
Posted by Michelle Moquin on 25th June 2016
Good Morning!
For you science freaks, this is cool.
From Science Alert:
WATCH: The blackest material on Earth can make dense metal float
One of the very first things you’ll learn in science class is that if something is denser than water, it sinks. A rock or a hunk of metal is denser than water, so no surprises what happens when you chuck one of those into a pond, but styrofoam is less dense than water, so it floats. Strangely enough, crude oil is slightly less dense than salt water, so that’s why it floats on the surface of the ocean.
Now that we’ve established the rules, let’s break them, using the coolest material ever – Vantablack, the blackest material on Earth.
In the video above, scientists from Surrey Nanosystems – the British company that invented Vantablack back in 2014 - demonstrate how the material is somehow able to make an aluminium disk float in a tub of water.
As you can see in the footage, both the aluminium and the water aren’t particularly happy about the situation, because the water is doing everything it can to bulge up and over the aluminium, but the incredibly hydrophobic Vantablack coating keeps repelling it away.
When the aluminium is dunked and retrieved from the water, it’s completely dry.
So what the hell is this physics-breaking substance? It might look like it, but Vantablack isn’t a paint, pigment, or fabric – it’s a special coating made from millions of carbon nanotubes, each one measuring around 20 namometres by 14 to 50 microns (1 nanometre equals 0.001 microns).
According to Surrey Nanosystems, a surface area of just 1 cm squared would contain around 1,000 million of these nanotubes.
When it was first unveiled back in 2014 as the blackest material ever produced, it could absorb all but 0.035 percent of visible light, making it borderline invisible to our eyes. In March, the team managed to make it even more black, and claimed that no spectrometer in the world is powerful enough to measure how much light it absorbs.
The reason Vantablack can render a dense aluminium disk buoyant is because, not only is it incredibly black, it also has ultra-low surface energy. As the video above explains, the coating’s low surface energy combined with the area of the disk helps to give it positive buoyancy. So cool.
To see more of this crazy stuff in action, here’s the newest iteration of the immeasurably black Vantablack:
!!!!!
Pretty cool huh? What’s on your mind this morning?
Blog me.
Thanks for being here with me!
Erica: It is one of the reasons why I am so pro Hillary. Sympathy only gets you so far, and as we women have seen and experienced, it doesn’t take us far enough. Men will never be able to empathize with us women. Only a woman can do that. It’s time we women ban together and as you say, “…vote the male misogynistic bastards out.” I’m with ya.
George/WP: You know I don’t hate men. I hate the things they do. You’ve been here long enough – you should know that by now. For once I agree with you and plan to do that. Just watch me.
DSCC: Nicely stated. I too cannot stress enough that Hillary needs those coattails…long and flowing. It’s up to us to get off of our lazy asses and give them to her. I HOPE America gets it.
Social Butterfly: Thanks for posting, Loved it. If so many are for gun control laws, and we know the majority are, we/they need to speak out and call Congress. There is no more sitting through silence and wishing things would change. We the people have to demand change.
Wayne: Thank you for posting this. It is just so sickening to me. I signed the petition from MoveOn. I encourage everyone else to sign as well.
Helen: My pleasure. I thought of getting a Samsung but decided to go with the iphone for convenience since I have a mac. The camera on the Samsung is such a better quality than the iphone 5s. I hope you’re enjoying it.
Right on, MoveOn.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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