Related papers: Developments in General Relativity: Black Hole Sin…

Gravity warps space and time into a funnel and generates a black hole when a cosmic body undergoes a catastrophic collapse. What can one say about the interior of a black hole? The important point is that inside a black hole the space…

General Relativity provides us with some solutions for rotating black holes. However, there are some problems associated with them: the appearance of singularities, the possibility of violations of the cosmic censorship conjecture, the…

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…

The Schwarzschild space is one of the best studied spacetimes and its exhaustive considerations are easily accessible. Nevertheless, by some reasons it is still surrounded by a lot of misconceptions, myths, and "paradoxes". In this…

Black holes harbor a spacetime singularity of infinite curvature, where classical spacetime physics breaks down, and current theory cannot predict what will happen. However, the singularity is invisible from the outside because strong…

An outstanding problem in gravitation theory and relativistic astrophysics today is to understand the final outcome of an endless gravitational collapse. Such a continual collapse would take place when stars more massive than few times the…

The possible existence of black holes has fascinated scientists at least since Michell and Laplace's proposal that a gravitating object could exist from which light could not escape. In the 20th century, in light of the general theory of…

We review here some of the major open issues and challenges in black hole physics today, and the current progress on the same. It is pointed out that to secure a concrete foundation for the basic theory as well as astrophysical applications…

Collapsed objects have definitely been observed: some are stellar-mass objects, the endpoint of massive stars; others, millions of times more massive, have been discovered in the cores of most galaxies. Their formation poses some…

The collapse of astrophysically significant bodies generates, under suitable conditions, black holes. Since one expects the generator of the black hole to be a rotating body, the black hole will also rotate. The existence of inner…

It is now known that when a massive star collapses under the force of its own gravity, the final fate of such a continual gravitational collapse will be either a black hole or a naked singularity under a wide variety of physically…

What is going on (as of August 2008) at the interface between theoretical general relativity, string-inspired models, and observational astrophysics? Quite a lot. In this mini-survey I will make a personal choice and focus on four specific…

The Hawking-Penrose singularity theorem states that a singularity forms inside a black hole in general relativity. To remove this singularity one must resort to a more fundamental theory. Using a corrected dynamical equation arising in loop…

Black hole spacetimes that exhibit integrable singularities have gained considerable interest as alternatives to both regular and singular black holes. Unlike most known regular black hole solutions, these models evade the formation of an…

The recent observation of gravitational waves confirms one of the most interesting predictions in general relativity: the black holes. Because the gravitational waves detected by LIGO fit very well within general relativity as a phenomenon…

The problem of the event horizon in relativistic gravity is discussed. Singular solutions in general relativity are well known. The Schwarschild metric of a spherical mass is singular at zero ($r = 0$) and at the event horizon ($r = r_g$).…

While singularities are inevitable in the classical theory of general relativity, it is commonly believed that they will not be present when quantum gravity effects are taken into account in a consistent framework. In particular, the…

A test particle falling into a classical black hole crosses the event horizon and ends up in the singularity within finite eigentime. In the `more realistic' case of a `classical' evaporating black hole, an observer falling onto a black…

We investigate the physics of black holes in the light of the quantum theoretical framework proposed in [1]. It is argued that black holes are completely non-local objects, and that the only one which really exists is the universe itself.

The existence of extremely dark and compact astronomical bodies is by now a well established observational fact. On the other hand, classical General Relativity predicts the existence of black holes which fit very well with the…