Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom amazed the whole world when it created one of the darkest substances possible. The material is known as Vantablack, and it’s capable of absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light. In other words, Vantablack is darker than the black color itself.
A bunch of scientists has now created the opposite: a super white paint capable of reflecting 95.5 percent of all the photons that reach it. This makes the material more luminous than white itself. What happens is that instead of warming up under the influence of light, objects painted with this new acrylic material will remain cooler than the temperature surrounding them. This applies even for exposure to the Sun’s heat.
Solution for global warming found?
Global warming, one of the aspects of climate change, causes plenty of unwanted scenarios for our planet: stressing ecosystems through temperature rises, drought, weed and pest invasions, water shortages, increasing fire threats, intense storm damage, salt invasion, and more. But there are some ways of fighting global warming, and one of them seems to be by using the super white material recently developed.
Xiulin Ruan, a scientist from Purdue University in Indiana, explained more:
It is a persistent task to develop a below-ambient radiative cooling solution that offers a convenient single-layer particle-matrix paint form and high reliability,
This is critical to the wide application of radiative cooling and to alleviate the global warming effect.
A material in the form of a single-layer paint capable of reflecting heat out into space without the need for an energy input would be a huge win for science, and we’re waiting to see how exactly it will be applied for the climate crisis that’s so prevalent in our environment.
The new discovery was published in Cell Reports Physical Science.
