Nobody has ever seen a black hole. The pictures we have aren't of the black hole itself.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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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.
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.
True, thanks for the addition! I forgot to mention that.
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.
I believe, like earth, they're an oblate spheroid as they will be spinning.