Hyundai Pavallion, Pyeong Chang

Blackest building on Earth, built to stand-out against the white snow of the winter olympics,

was there until March 18, 2018

Blackbodies



Blackbodies are idealized objects that are perfect absorbers (and emitters) of light, they reflect nothing which is why they are called Blackbodies. The Hyundai Pavillion is coated in Vantablack, a material that abosrbs 99.96 % of the light incident upon it. These idealized bodies (materials) are well-understood and because the complementary property of the absorption of light is the emission of light, we understood how such objects (materials) produce light:

An interesting aspect of the nature of blackbodies is that blackbodies are exceedingly simple, their emission is determined by only the temperature of the emitting object (independent of the object's composition, it can be a rock, a tree, a person, a star, a gas, ...; independent of its shape; independent of its size, ...). An important feature of how blackbodies produce light (the spectrum of its emitted light, the blackbody spectrum) is that it obeys what is referred to as Wien's Law:

Wien's Law: The hotter is an object the bluer it appears (the shorter the wavelength at which its peak emission occurs). The cooler is an object, the redder it appears:

Remarkably, the Universe shows a blackbody spectrum to a higher degree than any Terrestrially produced blackbody:

The above is drawn from the FIRAS experiment on the Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer (COBE). The current best estimate for the CMB is 2.725 K.


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