observantTrapezium

My thoughts exactly 😂

That’s very unfortunate but hopefully you developed skills that will help you in your future career.

Yep, you got it right. The accretion disk is actually really flat. Those images are produced in simulations that take into account the curved (and very complex) paths light takes in the vicinity of a black hole. These images really depend on the angle between the line of sight and the disk.

Astrophysicist here. Yes, space is crazy, but interesting things to keep in mind:

1. The size of a star is determined by something called the photosphere. With those extremely massive stars, you can be hundreds of millions of kilometres “inside” and not yet know it.
2. Similar story with supermassive black holes, from the perspective of an astronaut falling in, they wouldn’t really be able to tell when they cross the horizon because the tidal forces there are very small (they will inevitably fall towards the centre and get spaghettified at some point)