A black hole's shadow can split into two separate rings if its surrounding gas disk gets torn apart by gravity.
April 23, 2026
Original Paper
Reshaping the inner shadow of a Kerr black hole by a torn accretion disk
arXiv · 2604.20499
The Takeaway
We usually expect a black hole to look like a simple, circular dark spot surrounded by a ring of light. This simulation shows that when a tilted accretion disk is ripped into pieces, it creates multiple rings and a distorted shadow. This bizarre visual effect happens because the black hole's rotation actually drags the fabric of space along with it. This discovery means that our photos of black holes might be much harder to interpret than we thought. Astronomers will have to be extremely careful when using these shadows to test if Einstein's theories are correct.
From the abstract
When an accretion flow extends to the event horizon, their intersection defines the contour of the inner shadow. However, the morphological evolution of this critical feature remains largely unexplored within a torn accretion disk system, a configuration comprising distinct sub-disks formed when a tilted disk is disrupted by frame-dragging. To address this, we phenomenologically construct a torn accretion disk model and numerically simulate the inner shadow of a Kerr black hole using relativisti