Blackholes - the *real* way to visualize them

Has anybody actually tried to go beyond the artists impression of a blackhole? See below for the classical depiction of one.

It pictures space-time as a two-dimensional fabric, which gets warped in a perpendicular direction. The act of making it warp perpendicularly (in most cases, vertically) is to help visualize an object falling into the deep pit that eventually collapses into a singularity. After all, it is a convenient depiction. The diagram likens it to a vortex, in which swirling objects get thrown into it, much like when we have whirlpools that suck everything to the depths of the ocean.

However, this is a misleading diagram. It's to help visualize the warping of space-time. However, space-time isn't two-dimensional; space-time is linked together, bringing the three spatial dimensions together with the fourth. In other words, space-time is a four-dimensional concept. And that is something tough to visualize.

A better way to visualize a black hole in the midst of a three-dimensional space is to think of it as a dot. After all, that's what the penultimate distinctive feature of a black-hole is - infinitely large amounts of matter compressed into an infinitely small space: the dot.

The artist's impression below would probably be a better description.

Here, the artist shows the dot in an exaggeratedly large manner, so as to ease visualization. In this, the black hole sucks in all the hydrogen and helium and all other matter from a star neighboring it.The black hole, however, is spherical, and sucks in matter from all directions - up, down, left, right, forward, backward (it all depends on your spatial orientation).

I was thinking, if we took the space-time visualization a little further, then perhaps the warping of the space-time fabric could be extended and repeated in a pattern such that there would be an infinite number of vortices pointing in an infinite number of directions. That would help to explain the warping of space-time in all three dimensions of space such that matter fell in from all directions.

Now, the next big problem is figuring out how to visualize time. That's probably in Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", Chapter 9 "The Arrow of Time". And that's for next time. ;)