What strikes me most about the black hole photo is that the surrounding gasses are a ring rather than a sphere. Before the picture came out, I imagined that the view might not be a dark spot after all, but rather a sperical formation based on the cosmic matter surrounding the black hole on all sides.

The fact that it shows up as a ring suggests that the same sort of normalization of paths which give star systems (like our solar system) and galaxies (like our own milky way) their characteristic flat-ish shapes apply even at the scale and proximity of gasses near the event horizon of a black hole.

Or maybe not. This is all based on a viewing of an image. It could be that the ring appears to be a sphere because of other factors, e.g. radiation passing through the gas cloud tangentially to the black hole from our perspective, where the same radiation coming from the other side wouldn’t make it through. Considering the nice ring view we have would imply that we just happen to be studying the thing from a perfect wheel-axle angle, I’m going to guess that it’s a more complex phenomenon than my gut reaction suggests.