Dissecting a Black Hole

How should we depict a black hole?

They are usually shown as a solid black ball, the size of the event horizon. But this creates a lot of misunderstandings of what black holes are and how they work. For example, it leads people (even experts) to conflate the different spherical shells that surround a black hole, such as its event horizon, photon sphere, and shadow.

This led me to design a new kind of black hole diagram — an attempt to reorganise and distill the existing knowledge to help us better visualise and understand the nature of a black hole. It depicts it as a single point in space surrounded by a set of concentric spheres at which different properties of the black hole manifest. By slicing through all of these spheres, we see it laid out like a record on a turntable, displaying all its different tracks — both the classic hits that may have blurred together in lower fidelity diagrams as well as some deep cuts you may never have encountered before.

You can download it in high resolution — best for viewing on a phone, tablet, or desktop.

You can download it in extreme resolution — best for printing as a poster for your classroom, bedroom, or boardroom.

Or try the zoomable version below — best for viewing on a laptop (make sure to click its fullscreen button).