Can you clarify what you mean by "Black Hole"? If you're talking the accretion disk, it's more of a pancake shape, if you mean the event horizon, then yes, roughly spherical, if you're talking about the singularity at the centre, then trying to describe it using math and geometry is just going to make your head hurt because your brain isn't designed to process reality that alien to your experience that laughs in the face of the limitations of human comprehension.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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I think they are spherical, but there is stuff surrounding it, and also the gravity bends the light around it. That's what give them the weird appearance.
Just a guess. I dunno anything.
As far as I understood it, yes, a black hole, or rather the event horizon around it, is perfectly round. The problem you describe is that you can't see the black hole, as that is the whole point of why they are called black. What you can see though, is the light behind the hole that gets "blocked", creating a seemingly literal black hole in space.
But that is not the whole truth, because you do in fact see the light behind it. Since the gravity of the hole bends space time around it and you can indeed see the part that is behind it, albeit distorted around the event horizon. What you describe as changing view from up or down is indeed just the different view behind the hole, not the hole itself.
the event horizon of black holes is not universally spherical. Rather, it can vary from a perfect sphere due to rotation or other movement.
Would the shape of the accretion disk also affect the shape of the black hole?
True, thanks for the addition! I forgot to mention that.
I believe, like earth, they're an oblate spheroid as they will be spinning.
When the first image of black hole was due to be released, a few science channels had videos on what we should see (and did). And was also depicted as in the movie Interstellar.
had one of the first and supposedly the best and easiest to understand using visual aids.
The very simplest reason is because of the accretion disk, which is the only part we can actually see, and how the black hole's gravity warps the back part of the disk around so we see many sides of it that we wouldn't without the strong gravity bending the light. I.e., we don't see the part of Saturn's rings that are behind the planet.
Nobody has ever seen a black hole. The pictures we have aren't of the black hole itself.
Not true. This is a direct image, even though it was captured by radiotelescopes and not optical ones.
That's a picture of the glowing plasma orbiting right outside the event horizon and the black hole's shadow in the centre - not a picture of the black hole itself.
Mu.
This answer is based on watching a bunch of PBS Spacetime videos. I am not remotely an astrophysicist.
When you delve into black holes, the concept of "sphere" eventually becomes ambiguous. A black hole is an infinitely-dense region of spacetime, called a singularity, which has only three properties: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.
What most people think of as a black hole is a region bounded by the event horizon. The event horizon isn't an actual thing, it's a mathematically-defined radius around the singularity. You would no more notice crossing the event horizon than you would crossing the boundary of a timezone on Earth. If the black hole's angular momentum is 0, then the event horizon forms a sphere, because all points on the event horizon are by definition the same distance from the singularity.
But things get weird when the black hole is rotating. Because of some stuff I don't quite understand, rotation causes the singularity to turn into a ring rather than a point, so you could theoretically drive a spaceship through the hole in the middle (you could not actually do this because by the time you get there your spaceship will have been vaporised by the accretion disk and torn apart by gravity). In this case, the event horizon forms a sphere that is squashed along its axis of rotation, kind of like Earth.
But black holes are weirder still! Scientists say that they break physics, but it's even more fundamental than that. A bit below the event horizon, time and space themselves swap, so that the singularity changes from a point of irresistible attraction to an inevitable point in the future. The maths suggests that, if you were to hit the singularity, you(re atoms) would emerge in a universe with time instead of space and space instead of time.
It's bizarre is what I'm saying.