Academic literature on the topic 'Black hole structure'

There exists a large scientific literature on black holes, including many excellent textbooks of various levels of difficulty. However, most of these prefer physical intuition to mathematical rigour. The object of this book is to fill this gap and present a detailed, mathematically oriented, extended introduction to the subject. The first part of the book starts with a presentation, in Chapter 1, of some basic facts about Lorentzian manifolds. Chapter 2 develops those elements of Lorentzian causality theory which are key to the understanding of black-hole spacetimes. We present some applications of the causality theory in Chapter 3, as relevant for the study of black holes. Chapter 4, which opens the second part of the book, constitutes an introduction to the theory of black holes, including a review of experimental evidence, a presentation of the basic notions, and a study of the flagship black holes: the Schwarzschild, Reissner–Nordström, Kerr, and Majumdar–Papapetrou solutions of the Einstein, or Einstein–Maxwell, equations. Chapter 5 presents some further important solutions: the Kerr–Newman–(anti-)de Sitter black holes, the Emperan–Reall black rings, the Kaluza–Klein solutions of Rasheed, and the Birmingham family of metrics. Chapters 6 and 7 present the construction of conformal and projective diagrams, which play a key role in understanding the global structure of spacetimes obtained by piecing together metrics which, initially, are expressed in local coordinates. Chapter 8 presents an overview of known dynamical black-hole solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations.

The Cosmic Mystery Tour is a brief account of modern physics and astronomy presented in a broad historical and cultural context. The book is attractively illustrated and aimed at the general reader. Part I explores the laws of physics including general relativity, the structure of matter, quantum mechanics and the Standard Model of particle physics. It discusses recent discoveries such as gravitational waves and the project to construct LISA, a space-based gravitational wave detector, as well as unresolved issues such as the nature of dark matter. Part II begins by considering cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole and how we arrived at the theory of the Big Bang and the expanding universe. It looks at the remarkable objects within the universe such as red giants, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes, and considers the expected discoveries from new telescopes such as the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile, and the Event Horizon Telescope, currently aiming to image the supermassive black hole at the galactic centre. Part III considers the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life, from the speculations of science fiction authors to the ongoing search for alien civilizations known as SETI. Recent developments are discussed: space probes to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn; the discovery of planets in other star systems; the citizen science project SETI@Home; Breakthrough Starshot, the project to develop technologies to send spacecraft to the stars. It also discusses the Fermi paradox which argues that we might actually be alone in the cosmos