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IIRC, the black hole in Interstellar was also rapidly rotating, which I think was significant to how it looked:

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrophysics-interstellar-blac...

> Nolan's story relied on time dilation: time passing at different rates for different characters. To make this scientifically plausible, Thorne told him, he'd need a massive black hole—in the movie it's called Gargantua—spinning at nearly the speed of light.

> ...

> Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”



I'm still wondering why the accretion disk from the released images isn't warped in a way we saw in interstellar. Are we looking at it top-down rather than from its orbital disk? would a differently oriented black hole look more like interstellar? Veritasium also has an explanation and I don't think it has anything to do with its spin.


Also, the following post on reddit might help you visualize this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/bc343r/for_those_con...


Intersterllar chose to view the disk edge on, when the distortions got the most funky at all.


I think the rotation from M87 is 15 degrees off from our perspective, so yes we are looking mostly "down" at it.


Sure, the BH spin affects the photon orbits somewhat. But the effect of the rotation of the accretion disk itself is completely neglected despite being one of the mayor effects.




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