Whenever I see pictures of black holes warping space time, it looks like a sink hole sucking matter in. So, hypothetically, if you were to approach it does it just look the same from all sides, or face a certain direction?
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Can be entered from all sides.
Some of them spin quite quickly, and that causes gravitational waves. Meaning you could very well die from the gravity waves ripping you to shreds, long before a slow spinning black hole would
Matter falling in generally happens in a plane, or a disk actually, and generally spins the same direction as the blackhole is spinning.
This is due to conservation of angular momentum. When stars or dust get captured by a black hole, when they interact gravitationally enough with other captured matter or the black hole itself, the net effect results in the average direction of spin direction and speed. We see this same behaviour in most star systems, and even galaxies.
Now what you see around the black hole is basically just gas that is falling close to the even horizon, the point of no return for matter, but not quite reaching it. As it falls in it gets faster, as it gets faster and bumps into to other gas, knocking it in but escaping and going into a higher energy state, booting some electrons out causing there to be free electrons in the mix, therefore the gas becomes a plasma, and it glows.
Now a consequence of the fast hot moving plasma is that it has that electric charge due to the higher energy state knocking electrons free. Now fundamentally, electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same thing. So anyways moving charged particles through space causes massive electromagnetic effects that can create astrophysical jets at the poles of the black hole.
These jets of hot plasma can be up to lightyears across, and generally indicate that a black hole has been actively ripping stars apart as they fall in for quite some time.
Otherwise black holes are largely featureless.
They are just so much mass concentrated at one point, that space and time is distorted around them. There is a region near the black holes that light cannot escape, we call it the event horizon, a boundary at which we see nothing beyond, even at the highest speed possible the speed of light, gravitational distortion is so great, that there are no paths that light can take to escape. So from those regions we see nothing. Pure blackness, with some stuff in between usually.
Next we would also see light that wraps around the black hole, up to several times. Actual space is just being distorted that much, that it is wrapping around the black hole is a straight line.
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