To get around these issues while maintaining some sort of aesthetic sensibility, many space artists have opted for a kind of idealized black hole image. You can think of this as a black hole boilerplate, and it contains a few key components.
Black hole boilerplate
First off, there’s the black hole itself, the sphere or void at the center of any black hole image. In reality, it’s a kind of negative image — an object defined by its absence. The curved edge of superheated gas we see defines a singularity’s outer limit, the black hole’s event horizon beyond which escape is impossible. The bubble of darkness that this edge abuts is the actual singularity.
Next up, there’s the cloud of dust and gas itself, called an accretion disk. Not all black holes have these, of course, but if we want an actual image, we’ve got to have something to contrast the black hole against. The accretion disk forms in somewhat the same way as Saturn’s rings: matter drawn inward by the black hole’s gravity begins to orbit, and it eventually flattens out into a thin disk.
“It’s very common for material to flow towards the black hole in the form of a disk,” says Erin Kara, a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland. “We’ve heard that they suck everything up around them, but actually, that hot gas will preferentially rotate around the black hole first, and then over time, will fall past the event horizon — this point of no return, which causes the dark ‘shadow’ in the middle of the image.”
10 Things You Don’t Know About Black Holes
You might also see black holes with what looks like massive beams of light coming from each side, perpendicular to the accretion disk. These are called relativistic jets, and they’re made of superheated plasma ejected from the accretion disk. The jets are some of the most powerful phenomenon in the known universe; they travel at a significant portion of the speed of light and can extend for thousands of light-years from the black hole itself. Only the largest and most active black holes will create jets, though in some cases they can be quite spectacular. Quasars, hugely powerful black holes at the centers of galaxies, can shine brighter than the entire Milky Way.
Now, let’s get back to the black hole boilerplate. The standard formula is usually: black sphere, glowing disk, maybe some jets. But that’s not how a black hole would truly appear to us. For a little more scientific realism, things have to start getting weird.