The black hole picture is one of the most deceptive scientific images ever

The black hole in the new picture sits at the centre of the galaxy M87, which is 55m light years away. The temptation is to interpret the EHT image as a straightforward telescopic view of the hot accretion disk, seen from above, with the black hole carving out a hole in the middle. Even if we saw the black hole fully side-on, the accretion disk wouldn’t just be a line-like object but would still look like a kind of halo, albeit with a sombrero-like shape: an image much like that used for the movie Interstellar, which was based on expert advice from Nobel laureate astrophysicist Kip Thorne.

Source: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk