How to Understand What Black Holes Look Like

Related video, made by Veritasium yesterday, is one of my favorite videos in a long time. He explained how the prediction of this image was made (before the image got released) and the video is great and fun to watch. [VIDEO]

Good video that correctly predicted the image and describes why it looks the way it does [1]. TL; DR The dark area is the entire surface of the event horizon, including the side facing away from us, plus some more due to photons missing the event horizon "directly" being drawn in. One side is brighter due to its being Doppler boosted. [1] [VIDEO]

If you mean the brightness asymmetry, it's because the accretion disc is spinning. This video predicts pretty well all of the features we expected to find, and it lines up with the actual image. [VIDEO]

The black hole itself is spherical, but the light we're seeing around it isn't projected by the event horizon; rather, it's light from behind/around the black hole that isn't blocked. This video explains in much more detail: [VIDEO]

Derek explains the physics in a reasonably understandable manner in this video on his Youtube channel: [VIDEO]

There's a clearer explanation of why the disk looks that way and how the gravitational warp makes those light paths [VIDEO]

Veritasium made an excellent youtube video explaining how this effect works (before the image was released!) [VIDEO]

If the black hole is not spinning, it should look the same from every angle. A spinning black hole is deformed (like the spinning Earth.) Anyway, we are not seeing the black hole (because it looks just like a black circle in front of a black background). The interesting part of the image is a disk of material spinning around it. There is a nice 3d cardboard simulation and clear explanation in a video by Veritasium [VIDEO]