system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why, in popular media, are black holes depicted as flat? Wouldn't they be spherical like a planet?
gpt
They are spherical, and they are generally depicted as such. It's just that when you portray a spherical object in a 2D image, it looks like a circle.

What can be flat is the accretion disk, the gas and plasma that's orbiting and falling into the black hole. It forms a disk because any gas not orbiting in the disk would collide with the disk and become part of it. Gas and plasma are highly collisional and will exchange angular momentum quickly until they're orbiting in a relatively smooth, circular orbit.