Black. Blacker. Blackest.

There's black.  Then there's Vantablack.  A synthetically produced black that's so black it boggles the mind.  It's like looking at a black object that's real, but it doesn't look real. It looks fake. It looks like someone painted black over a portion of reality.

Vantablack stands for "vertically aligned nanotubules". Light enters nanotubes (a billion a square centimeter) and bounces around changing into heat and releasing virtually no light. Thus, the unreal perception of "nothing". Later technologies improved on Vantablack.  In fact, back in 2017, I posted about this material near its inception. So, what's the point of mentioning this material?

Man was not the first to discover a material with such high light absorption properties. It's found in the natural world, in deep-sea creatures. It's been around for who knows how many millenia.  Some of these deep-sea creatures absorb up to 99.956 percent of the light that hits them. Intrigued?  Check out the article from Wired.com that discusses this naturally created phenomenon in more detail.

P.S. Check out this article for details on some history of Vantablack.