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Watch out, final frontier. Klingons aren’t the only ones with cloaking devices anymore.

Until recently, most attempts to cloak or make objects “invisible” have been focused around artificial materials engineered to provide properties not available in nature. For example, in terms of cloaking technology, metamaterials draped over or combined with an object make light rays arrive as if they aren’t being reflected or passing over the cloaked object.

New experiments performed at the University of Texas at Austin have enabled researchers to cloak a 3D object in free space, a world first. Plasmonic metamaterials were used to essentially create a “photo-negative” of the object being cloaked, thus making it invisible. There’s a catch, though. So far this cloaking only works for microwaves in the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning it’s still visible to the human eye.

Still, the technology is exciting. It’s also way above my level of comprehension. I never tackled physics, let alone quantum physics. Nevertheless, it opens up doors for other researchers for developing similar or improved technologies.

Does this mean we’ll have cloaking devices on our planes and spacecraft in the next few years? Definitely not. We still need to figure out how to make objects disappear within the spectrum of visible light, but that’s only a matter of time. However, similar technology might have been used on the alien spacecraft that was recently spotted next to Mercury. Creepy, huh?