Like whirlpools in the ocean, spinning black holes in space create a swirling torrent around them. However, black holes do not create eddies of wind or water. Rather, they generate disks of gas and dust heated to hundreds of millions of degrees that glow in X-ray light.

While a black hole and an ocean whirlpool may look similar in a textbook diagram, they are fundamentally different physical phenomena. A whirlpool is a fluid dynamics event where water rotates around a central axis due to tides or currents, but the water itself still exists in three-dimensional space and you could theoretically swim through it. A black hole, however, is a region of space-time where gravity is so intense that the very fabric of the universe is warped. The "vortex" of a black hole is not made of spinning liquid but of matter packed into an infinitely dense point called a singularity. However, in 2026, physicists often use the "whirlpool analogy" to describe the Ergosphere of a spinning black hole. In this region, space-time itself is "dragged" around the black hole in a process called frame-dragging, much like water is dragged around a drain. Light and matter trapped in this swirl cannot stand still, no matter how much energy they expend. So, while a black hole isn't "just" a whirlpool, the mathematical equations used to describe the flow of light around a black hole's event horizon are remarkably similar to those used to model the turbulence of a massive oceanic vortex.