A team of marine biologists have discovered 16 new species of terrifying deep-sea fish that reflect almost no light at all, Wired reports — much like the ultra-black material Vantablack.
Marine biologist Karen Osborn was astonished when she attempted to take pictures of a fangtooth, a terrifying fanged monster of the deep sea, for cataloguing reasons. The fish appeared to absorb almost all of the light her underwater studio shone at it, leaving only eerie silhouettes.
“I had tried to take pictures of deep-sea fish before and got nothing but these really horrible pictures, where you can’t see any detail,” Osborn, who co-authored a paper about the fish published in Current Biology, told Wired. “How is it that I can shine two strobe lights at them and all that light just disappears?”
“It’s like looking at a black hole,” lead author Alexander Davis, a Duke University biologist, told The New York Times.

Astronomers have detected a gravitational wave from a black hole so massive that existing theories suggest it shouldn't exist.

The black hole that formed from the merger that sent the gravitational wave through space is 142 times the mass of the Sun, making it the most massive ever to be observed with gravitational waves. And the energy that it released through the universe is the equivalent to around eight solar masses, spreading out across the universe.

"This doesn't look much like a chirp, which is what we typically detect," said Nelson Christensen, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research who helped pick up the signal. "This is more like something that goes 'bang,' and it's the most massive signal LIGO and Virgo have seen."

“The system we’ve discovered is so bizarre that it breaks a number of previous assumptions about how black holes form," said Karan Jani, a researcher from Vanderbilt University who was involved in the research, in a statement. "We took more than a year to confirm this alien black hole’s existence and are thrilled to be sharing this discovery with the world.”