"It’s like staring ‘into a black hole’: World’s darkest material will be used to make very stealthy aircraft, better telescopes"

"Vantablack is essentially a forest of carbon nanotubes on an aluminium foil. Surrey NanoSystems, the company that created Vantablack, presumably to look after its trade secrets, is rather coy about how it built the material and how it actually works. There is a clue in the name, however: The Vanta in Vantablack stands for “vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays.” We also know that Surrey NanoSystems prides itself in low-temperature atomic deposition processes — so we’re probably looking at ALD (atomic layer deposition) or CVD (chemical vapor deposition) carbon nanotubes on an aluminium substrate."

"Speaking to the Independent, the company’s CTO, Ben Jensen, attempted to describe the material — which is rather hard, as you can’t really see it. Even when you bend or crumple the Vantablack, the material — or rather, the dark nothingness created by the material — looks completely flat. “You expect to see the hills [of the bends and crumples] and all you can see … it’s like black, like a hole, like there’s nothing there. It just looks so strange.” "

"Vantablack’s first customers are in the defence and space sectors, where the material can be used to make a whole variety of stealth craft and weaponry, and more sensitive telescopes that can detect the faintest of faraway stars."