Related papers: Might black holes reveal their inner secrets?
Black holes behave as thermodynamic systems, and a central task of any quantum theory of gravity is to explain these thermal properties. A statistical mechanical description of black hole entropy once seemed remote, but today we suffer an…
We review the status of the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, which asserts, in essence, that all singularities of gravitational collapse are hidden within black holes. Although little progress has been made toward a general proof (or…
An exact energy expression for a physical black hole is derived by considering the escape of a photon from the black hole. The mass of the black hole within its horizon is found to be twice its mass as observed at infinity. This result is…
A possible process to destroy a black hole consists on throwing point particles with sufficiently large angular momentum into the black hole. In the case of Kerr black holes, it was shown by Wald that particles with dangerously large…
During the black hole radiation, the interior contains all the matter of the initial black hole, together with the negative energy quanta entangled with the exterior Hawking radiation. Neither the initial matter nor the negative energy…
There is persistent and endemic confusion between the true (future) horizon and the illusory (past) horizon of a black hole. The illusory horizon is the redshifting surface of matter that fell into the black hole long ago. A person who…
We argue that a black hole can be viewed as a gravitational optical element that images its interior onto the horizon. Being diffraction limited the "Airy hyper-ball" that forms as a result of interference of gravitational waves, does not…
The black hole information paradox has been with us for some time. We outline the nature of the paradox. We then propose a resolution based on an examination of the properties of quantum gravity under circumstances that give rise to a…
The supposed information paradox for black holes is based on the fundamental misunderstanding that black holes are usefully defined by event horizons. Understood in terms of locally defined trapping horizons, the paradox disappears:…
It was long believed that the singularity inside a realistic, rotating black hole must be spacelike. However, studies of the internal geometry of black holes indicate a more complicated structure is typical. While it seems likely that an…
It is well known that celestial bodies tend to be spherical due to gravity and that rotation produces deviations from this sphericity. We discuss what is known and expected about the shape of black holes' horizons from their formation to…
We briefly discuss non-singular black hole models, with the main focus on the properties of non-singular evaporating black holes. Such black holes possess an apparent horizon, however the event horizon may be absent. In such a case, the…
In a previous paper, we studied the interior solution of a collapsing body in a non-local theory of gravity super-renormalizable at the quantum level. We found that the classical singularity is replaced by a bounce, after which the body…
Recently, several ways of obtaining observational proof of the existence of black-hole horizons have been proposed. We argue here that such proof is fundamentally impossible: observations can provide arguments, sometimes very strong ones,…
We investigate the interiors of 3+1 dimensional asymptotically flat charged and rotating black holes as described by observers who fall into the black holes at late times, long after any perturbations of the exterior region have decayed. In…
The prediction that black holes radiate due to quantum effects is often considered one of the most secure in quantum field theory in curved space-time. Yet this prediction rests on two dubious assumptions: that ordinary physics may be…
While the event horizon of a black hole could cast a shadow that was observed recently, a central singularity without horizon could also give rise to such a feature. This leaves us with a question on the nature of the supermassive black…
The black-hole information paradox has fueled a fascinating effort to reconcile the predictions of general relativity and those of quantum mechanics. Gravitational considerations teach us that black holes must trap everything that falls…
If a system falls through a black hole horizon, then its information is lost to an observer at infinity. But we argue that the {\it accessible} information is lost {\it before} the horizon is crossed. The temperature of the hole limits…
How to describe a black hole embedded in an expanding universe is an important topic. Some models about this issue are suggested by assuming that the metric is a conformal transformation of the Schwarzschild metric or of the isotropic black…