Up until the other day, we had assumed that the blackest, most dense object in the universe was a black Puli stacked for a show photograph.

And then we learned about Vantablack,  the darkest material ever made by man.

Vantablack is a special “superblack” material made by using tiny tubes of carbon so small that they can’t be seen by the naked eye. Vantablack is so dark that it absorbs 99.965% of all the light that hits it.

How?

When light hits Vantablack, it gets trapped in a forest of the aforementioned tiny tubes instead of bouncing off like it does with most other things. It bounces around between the tubes so much that it turns into heat and disappears, and this means that almost no light comes back out. An example we came across by way of explaining this better is to imagine a piece of crumpled aluminum foil. When it is covered it with Vantablack, all wrinkles disappear making the formerly bumpy piece of foil look like a flat, super dark hole.

Image shared under creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Here’s another example:

It’s what we image it would be like to stare into a black hole. No matter what Vantablack is put on, that item will look utterly flat.  The applications for this are many. Astronomers use it in telescopes to see distant stars better while artists……and as for artists – what can’t an artist do with this stuff?

In 2018, Asif Khan created a pavilion for the Winter Olympics in South Korea that was coated in Vantablack Vbx2 and made the building look like a void against the snowy landscape;

Anish Kapoor painted a circular hole in the floor in one installation, painted with Vantablack, and inattentive gallery goers who stepped onto it probably had years shaved off their life thinking they had stepped into a bottomless pit;

Activision coated a room in Vantablack for the launch of their Black Ops 4 video game which allowed gamers to play in an environment where the only visible light came from the screen. Freaky.

But back to dogs.