this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Is it theoretically possible to shoot something through the ring? Or does the even horizon completely envelop it?
It is, and you won't believe what happens!
...
What? What do I look like, PBS Spacetime??
userface checks out
https://www.pbs.org/video/how-black-holes-spin-space-time-klqijt/ talks about passing through the ring
Gracias, amigo
the event horizon is effectively a sphere, like inflating a donut-shaped balloon (that can't pop). Eventually the middle hole is going to close like a sphincter (enjoy that imagery) and the whole thing will approach the shape of a sphere because that's what anything becomes when you inflate it hugely.
The Black hole isn't a ring, it's a fuckin sphere, the ring surround it in it's equator. Grinded material more and more acelerated until almost the speed of light nearby the hole, from where it falls into the hole to end as something nobody knows. Like the swirl formed when you take out the plug of the sink, but the hole in the middle is a sphere.
You are describing a Schwarzschild black hole. I am describing a Kerr black hole. A Schwarzchild black hole's singularity is not a sphere, it is a point. Because a Kerr black hole forms a ring, there is a path where gravity partially cancels out, and so the event horizon is not spherical.
Schwarzschild black holes describe black holes in a simplified state in which we don't expect to find actual objects. It vastly simplified the math, and for decades no one was able to work out the more complex situation we do expect to find in reality. My point above was that popular understanding of black holes is based on Schwarzchild black holes, and so a lot of the tropes don't fully grasp how weird real black holes are.
The original comment were referring to the ring singularity which is different from the accretion disk.
The singularity is unseen, we suppose it's a ring in rotating back holes, but we have no idea. As anything inside the event horizon, we cannot see what's going on in there.
The accretion disk is the disk of matter falling into the black hole, it's outside the event horizon and can be observed.
Supposing the singularity as an unidimensional something what we don't know. In any case we can't see the black hole as such, but the gravitation it causes, form a sphere arround the singularity, visible as such by the accretion disk. If not, we only can observe an black hole by its influence, eg, the gravitation lense effect.