The idea of a body so big that even light could not escape was briefly proposed by English astronomical pioneer and clergyman John Michell and independently by French scientist 展开

By nature, black holes do not themselves emit any electromagnetic radiation other than the hypothetical Hawking radiation, so astrophysicists searching for black holes must generally rely … 展开

The evidence for stellar black holes strongly relies on the existence of an upper limit for the mass of a neutron star. The size of this limit … 展开

Christopher Nolan's 2014 science fiction epic Interstellar features a black hole known as Gargantua, which is the central object of a planetary … 展开

The no-hair theorem postulates that, once it achieves a stable condition after formation, a black hole has only three independent physical … 展开

Given the bizarre character of black holes, it was long questioned whether such objects could actually exist in nature or whether they were merely pathological solutions to Einstein's equations. Einstein himself wrongly thought black holes would not form, because he … 展开

Entropy and thermodynamics
In 1971, Hawking showed under general conditions that the total area of the event horizons of any collection of classical black holes can never decrease, even if they collide and merge. This result, now known as the 展开