Related papers: Black holes in general relativity
Black holes are extreme outcomes of General Relativity, and can form through a variety of ways, including gravitational collapse of massive stars, or quantum fluctuations in the early universe. Here, we ask the question of whether they can…
The modeling of black holes is an important desideratum for any quantum theory of gravity. Not only is a classical black hole metric sought, but also agreement with the laws of black hole thermodynamics. In this paper, we describe how these…
Black holes have the peculiar and intriguing property of having an event horizon, a one-way membrane causally separating their internal region from the rest of the Universe. Today astrophysical observations provide some evidence for the…
The existence of supermassive collapsed objects in the cores of most galaxies poses still-unanswered questions. First, how did they form, and how does their mass depend on the properties of the host galaxy? Second, can observations probe…
These are the lecture notes for an introductory course on black holes and some aspects of their interaction with the classical and quantum world. The focus is on phenomena of "fundamental physics" in the immediate surroundings of the black…
We develop the general formalism for joining, splitting and interconnection of closed and open strings. As an application, we study examples of fundamental cosmic string collisions leading to gravitational collapse. We find that the…
The properties of higher-dimensional black holes can differ significantly from those of black holes in four dimensions, since neither the uniqueness theorem, nor the staticity theorem or the topological censorship theorem generalize to…
Recently wide publicity has been given to a claim by T. Vachaspati that "black holes do not exist", that the objects known as black holes in astrophysics should rather be called "black stars" and they not only do not have event horizons but…
Black holes are one of the most fascinating predictions of general relativity. They are the natural product of the complete gravitational collapse of matter and today we have a body of observational evidence supporting the existence of…
This resource letter is designed to guide students, educators, and researchers through (some of) the literature on black holes. Both the physics and astrophysics of black holes are discussed. Breadth has been emphasized over depth, and…
I present an elementary primer of black hole physics, including its general relativity basis, all peppered with astrophysical illustrations. Following a brief review of the process stellar collapse to a black hole, I discuss the…
Some of the theoretical challenges posed by the general relativistic description of binary systems of compact objects (neutron stars or black holes) are reviewed. We recall the various ways one can use the theory of the motion, and of the…
A star surrounded by a black hole generated by it is analyzed. For an outer static observer the black hole mass (and radius) depends on his position in the gravitational field of the star. In spite of the black hole presence, the geometry…
The subject of this work is the formation of black holes in pure general relativity, by the focusing of incoming gravitational waves. The theorems established in this monograph constitute the first foray into the long time dynamics of…
In this manuscript, I discuss the possibility of sending a small probe to the closest black hole with the goal of addressing some fundamental questions of modern physics. Are astrophysical black holes the Kerr black holes predicted by…
Black holes are the elementary particles of gravity, the final state of sufficiently massive stars and of energetic collisions. With a forty-year long history, black hole physics is a fully-blossomed field which promises to embrace several…
A very brief review is given of some of the developments leading to our current understanding of black holes in string theory. This is followed by a discussion of two possible misconceptions in this subject - one involving the stability of…
The classic black hole mechanics and thermodynamics are formulated for stationary black holes with event horizons. Alternative theories of gravity of interest for cosmology contain a built-in time-dependent cosmological "constant" and black…
We define different notions of black holes, event horizons and Killing horizons for a general time-oriented manifold $(M,g)$ extending previous notions but without the assumption of asymptotical flatness. The notions of 'horizon' are always…
This chapter provides a general overview of the theory and observations of black holes in the Universe and on their interpretation. We briefly review the black hole classes, accretion disk models, spectral state classification, the AGN…