Objects can appear specularly reflective while possessing a black body color.
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Physics explanations and optical studies demonstrate that objects with a black body color can exhibit high specular reflectance, such as glossy black surfaces, feathers, and graphite, by reflecting surface light via Fresnel reflection while absorbing transmitted light.
# Why can you have shiny black objects?
Tags: optics
- Score: 29
- Views: 18768
- Answers: 9
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: user172
- Asked: 2010-11-10
- Site: physics
## Question
Knowing black is supposed to be the "color" (I don't want to get into the color/hue/shade debate, please) that absorbs light. how does one manage to have shiny black surfaces? I know about "gloss black" versus "matte black" finishes, but shouldn't the light passing through the gloss (if they didn't pass through the gloss, you wouldn't see the black, right?) be absorbed by the underlying black object? Then there are black gemstones like jet and opal.
How do black objects shine?
## Answers
### Answer by ptomato (score: 21 [ACCEPTED])
At any surface (at least one which has a different index of refraction from air) some light is reflected, depending on the angle at which the light hits the surface and the polarization of the light; the Fresnel equations will tell you what fraction of your light is reflected and what fraction is transmitted. When you see a black object "shine", you are seeing the reflected light. But since the object is black, all the "transmitted" light is simply absorbed.
The differenc
What makes a feather shine? A nanostructural basis for glossy black colours in feathers
## Abstract
Colours in feathers are produced by pigments or by nanostructurally organized tissues that interact with light. One of the simplest nanostructures is a single layer of keratin overlying a linearly organized layer of melanosomes that create iridescent colours of feather barbules through thin-film interference. Recently, it has been hypothesized that glossy (i.e. high specular reflectance) black feathers may be evolutionarily intermediate between matte black and iridescent feathers, and thus have a smooth keratin layer that produces gloss, but not the layered organization of melanosomes needed for iridescence. However, the morphological bases of glossiness remain unknown. Here, we use a theoretical approach to generate predictions about morphological differences between matte and glossy feathers that we then empirically test. Thin-film models predicted that glossy spectra would result from a keratin layer 110-180 nm thick and a melanin layer greater than 115 nm thick. Transmission electron microscopy data show that nanostructure of glossy barbules falls well within that range, but th
# Why is crystalline graphite black yet shiny?
Tags: visible-light, reflection, crystals, metals, phonons
- Score: 15
- Views: 1527
- Answers: 1
- Answered: yes
- Asked by: user21820 (2937 rep)
- Asked: 2020-08-05
- Site: physics
## Question
I am unable to find images of pure crystalline graphite with high confidence, but based on various sources I believe that it should actually be both black and shiny, in the sense that it reflects much less visible light than a white piece of paper, and yet has a much more metallic sheen than paper. For example, this webpage has this image, which I guess is of pure crystalline graphite:
From my understanding, the absorption/emission spectrum of a material in the visible range is determined mostly by the permissible energy levels of the 'valence' electrons within the material. In a metal crystal, the atoms belong to a single macromolecule with macromolecular orbitals holding valence electrons, and so the electrons can easily absorb/emit photons across a wide continuous spectrum, hence contributing to the shiny lustre of metals. But this explanation also applies to crystalline graphite, where in each sheet we have macromolecular orbitals span
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