Vantablack, an eerily black substance produced by the British company Surrey Nanosystems, can absorb 99.965 percent of incoming light. It’s also only just short of the blackest materials that humans have designed. That’s between 10 and 100 times better than the feathers of most other black birds, like crows or blackbirds. McCoy and her colleagues, including Teresa Feo from the National Museum of Natural History, showed that this light-trapping nanotechnology can absorb up to 99.95 percent of incoming light. With each bounce, a little more of it gets absorbed. Instead of being reflected away, it bounces repeatedly between the barbules and their spikes. But when light hits a super-black feather, it finds a tangled mess of mostly vertical surfaces. When light hits a normal feather, it finds a series of horizontal surfaces, and can easily bounce off. These unique structures excel at capturing light. “It’s like a little bottlebrush or a piece of coral.” And instead of being smooth cylinders, they are studded in minuscule spikes. Their barbules, instead of lying flat, curve upward. The super-black feathers of birds-of-paradise, meanwhile, look very different. The whole arrangement is flat, with the rachis, barbs, and barbules all lying on the same plane. Thin branches, or barbs, sprout from the rachis, and even thinner branches-barbules-sprout from the barbs. ![]() It’s all in their feathers’ microscopic structure.Ī typical bird feather has a central shaft called a rachis. None more black.īy analyzing museum specimens, Dakota McCoy, from Harvard University, has discovered exactly how the birds achieve such deep blacks. They make body parts seem less like parts of an actual animal and more like gaping voids in reality. The feathers ruthlessly swallow light and, with it, all hints of edge or contour. For really black plumage, you need to travel to Papua New Guinea and track down the birds-of-paradise.Īlthough these birds are best known for their gaudy, kaleidoscopic colors, some species also have profoundly black feathers. Their feathers absorb most of the visible light that hits them, but still reflect between 3 and 5 percent of it. Blackbirds, it turns out, aren’t actually all that black.
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