Illustration Tristan Deppe and Jeremy N. Munday/University of Maryland

One of the problems with solar panels is that they don’t generate electricity at night, so we have to store the electricity they generate during the day to power things during the evening. That works fine, but what if we could develop solar panels that did generate electricity at night? It’s possible, and the way it works is pretty surprising.

Researchers from the University of California, Davis explain in a new paper that was just published in the journal ACS Photonics that if you want to create a solar panel that generates electricity at night, then you just have to create one that operates the exact opposite way solar panels work during the day. It’s being referred to as the “anti-solar panel.”

Solar panels are cold compared to the Sun, so they absorb the Sun’s light and turn it into energy. Space is very cold, so if you point a panel on Earth that is comparatively warm toward it, it will radiate heat as invisible […]