A few days ago, I had written a post about BMW teaming up with Surrey NanoSystems to unveil a special version of their X6 car, coated with Vantablack, the blackest material in existence.

If you didn't know already, Vantablack is a really dark material that absorbs 99.965% of visible light falling on it, making it look really, really black. If you looked at a small object coated with this material, it would seem like you are looking at a hole in space-time!

That's because we are just not accustomed to seeing that level of black. Even at night, there is light from different sources hitting our eyes and the black we see are not 'black enough'.

These light absorbing materials however show what true black can be. And while Vantablack has enjoyed the lead for quite some time as the blackest material in existence, a team from MIT has now invented an even blacker material.

99.995%

The engineering team from MIT were trying to boost certain properties of electrically conductive materials and in doing so, they accidentally created this material. Science has a great history of such accidental inventions and discoveries.

This new material can absorb 99.995% of light falling on it. The difference between 99.965% (of Vantablack) and 99.995% of the new material, may not seem as much but when the materials are used for real world applications, the tiny difference can make a huge difference.

The MIT team have now partnered with Diemut Strebe, an artist, to coat a $2 million diamond with this new material as part of an art exhibit and are open to offering it to other artists as well.

As for other real world applications, it can be used in telescopes to remove unwanted glare, potentially in cars like in the case of BMW, in camera lenses of smartphones, home appliances and other cool places, if they can figure out to mass produce it.

It will interesting to see whether this new material remains as the blackest material or if some other material will come along and be even blacker! There is not much room to improve however as we are really getting close to that 100% mark.