What if you could see the complete absence of light?
The darker something looks, the more light it's absorbing, and the less it's reflecting back at your eyes.
So a black hole, which absorbs all light, is the darkest thing possible.
Odds are you'll never see a black hole in person — the nearest one is thousands of lightyears away, and there's that unfortunate danger of being spaghetti-ed to death.
But if you really want to know what it looks like when something absorbs all light, a new material called Vantablack is pretty close to complete and total darkness.
And this stuff is freaky-looking.
Back in 2012, the British company Surrey NanoSystems started developing Vantablack, a coating that's made to absorb as much light as possible.
The first version of Vantablack, released in 2014, absorbed 99. 965% of the visible light that hit it.
Then, in March of this year, the company announced that they'd created a new version of Vantablack, called Vantablack 2, which absorbs so much light they can't even measure how much it's absorbing.
With either version of Vantablack, so little light gets reflected that your eyes can't figure out what they're looking at.