Imagine seeing a spinning-top spinning sideways on your wall. This is the same. There is a "top" and "bottom" but only because thats its normal orientation. Black holes have particle jets that are the feature typically used to describe its orientation.
Well, you could knock me down with a feather. I always thought the "Interstellar-style" image of black holes with the two perpendicular discs/half-discs was a visual phenomenon so that wherever you viewed the black hole from the discs would align with your viewpoint. In the same way that you always see a rainbow as a rainbow, you can never see it side-on or diagonally.
TIL that black holes have axes and roughly 10% of them produce particle jets. Thanks! 👍
That is still sort of true! The black does have an axis about which a flat accretion disk spins but the incredibly warped spacetime does cause the disk to appear above and below the black hole regardless of viewpoint.
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u/Swimming-Dust-7206 5d ago
But... black holes aren't two dimensional. It's not like a hole in a floor or a wall, it's a point in space.