The new lightest material ever barely even exists

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The new lightest material ever barely even exists

For a while aerogel was the lightest material on the planet, and then it was a metallic micro-lattice. Now, the title of the world’s lightest material belongs to aerographite, a physical material that’s only barely lighter than air itself.

The density of aerographite is a mere 0.2 milligram per cubic centimeter. For the record, the next best thing (those metallic lattice structures) are three times heavier at about 0.9 milligram per cubic centimeter. This stuff is more or less entirely made out of air, with what little structure there is consisting of a network of hollow carbon tubes grown at nano and micro scales, which you can see in the electron microscope image above. A clump of it would look something like black sponge, appearing completely opaque despite its absurdly low density (unlike aerogel).

Despite the fragile look, aerographite has some impressive structural properties. You can compress it down to make it 1,000 times smaller, and it’ll spring right back to its original size when you let go. It can also support over 40,000 times its own weight, which is 35 times better than aerogel can do.

Aerographite was created by researchers at Hamburg University of Technology and the University of Kiel, who suggest that a good application for this stuff might be as “electrode materials for the increasing demand of batteries and high surface area supercapacitor materials.”

Via