...winds from a black hole... hot gas...
Space flatulence?
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has caught a whiff of the fastest ever wind blowing from the gases around a stellar-mass black hole. High speed winds from a stellar-mass black hole Illustration of high-speed winds from the stellar-mass black hole. Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss The wind, which is moving at an awesome 20 million …
Er... I know everyone keeps drawing black holes as a little black orb sitting in a swirling disc, but doesn't basic high-school physics tell you that's bunk?
The BH will severely bend light from behind the event horizon, so there will be no black sphere to silhouette against the accretion disc, right?
If the BH is spinning the light from behind is getting frame-dragged, so it would look swirled - if anything it would look like a dull chrome sphere, right?
Matter circling the hole in the accretion disc is hot enough to emit x-rays, so it would likely be blindingly bright, obscuring the event horizon, right?
Said blindingly bright matter falling into the event horizon will red-shift as it accelerates, so if anything, the event horizon should appear red, right? OK, theoretically black as velocity approaches c, but red will be the 'last light' we see - by definition the 'black' (no light) will already be INSIDE the event horizon, yes?
From all of that, we can surmise that a black hole looks like a reddish-coppery-mildly-reflective sphere sitting in a blazing bright ring, with eye-watering bright red swirly patterns close to the hole. The part of the event horizon facing directly at you might be close to black, which would give it a weird reverse-anisotropic look - I guess there would be some strange diffraction produced by whirling masses near light-speed. It would NOT be a simple black orb.
My high school physics runs out there, can a friendly wandering physicist provide a more detailed hypothesis?
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