The simplest type of black hole, in which the core does not rotate and just has

a singularity and an event horizon, is known as a Schwarzschild black hole after the
German physicist Karl Schwarzschild who pioneered much of the very early theory
behind black holes in the 1910s, along with Albert Einstein. In 1958, David
Finkelstein published a paper, based on Einstein and Schwarzschild’s work,
describing the idea of a “one-way membrane” which triggered a renewed interest
in black hole theory (although the phrase itself was not coined until a lecture by John
Wheeler in 1967).

In 1963, the New Zealander Roy Kerr discovered a solution to Einstein’s field
equations of general relativity which described a spinning object, and suggested that
anything which collapsed would eventually settle down into a spinning black hole. It
spins because the star from which it formed was spinning, and it is now thought that
this is actually likely to be the most common form in nature. A rotating black
hole would bulge outward near its equator due to its rotation (the faster the spin, the
more the bulge).

In the mid-1960s, the young English mathematician

Roger Penrose devoted himself to the study of black
holes and, in 1965, he proved an important theorem
which showed that a gravitational collapse of a large
dying star must result in a singularity, where space-
time cannot be continued and classical general
relativity breaks down. Penrose and Wheeler went
on to prove that any non-rotating star, however
complicated its initial shape and internal structure, (Click for a larger version)
would end up after gravitational collapse as a Spinning and non-spinning black
perfectly spherical black hole, whose size would holes
(Source: Chandra X-Ray
depend solely on its mass. Observatory: http://chandra.harvard.edu/
photo/2003/bhspin/)

In the late 1960s, Penrose collaborated with his

Cambridge friend and colleague, Stephen Hawking, in more investigations into the
subject. They applied a new, complex mathematical model derived
from Einstein's theory of general relativity, which led, in 1970, to Hawking's proof of
the first of several singularitytheorems. Such theorems provided a set of sufficient
conditions for the existence of a gravitational singularity in space-time, and showed
that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special
cases, singularities are actually a fairly generic feature of general relativity.

Although it may seem a very complex, peculiar and perhaps counter-intuitive object,
a black hole can essentially be described by just three quantities: how
much mass went into it, how fast it is spinning (its angular momentum) and
its electrical charge. This came to be known as the “No Hair Theorem”, after John
Wheeler’s comment that “black holes have no hair”, by which he meant that any
other information about the matter which formed a black hole (for which "hair" is a
metaphor) remains permanently inaccessible to external observers within its event
horizon, and is all but irrelevant.

Brandon Carter and Stephen Hawking proved the No-Hair Theorem mathematically
in the early 1970s, showing that the size and shape of a rotating black hole would
depend only on its mass and rate of rotation, and not on the nature of the body that
collapsed to form it. They also proposed four laws of black hole mechanics,
analogous to the laws of thermodynamics, by relating mass to energy, area
to entropy, and surface gravity to temperature.

In 1974, Hawking shocked the physics world by

showing that black holes should in fact thermally
create and emit sub-atomic particles, known today
as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust
their energy and evaporate completely. According to
this theory, black holes are not completely black, and
neither do they last forever.

Hawking showed how the strong gravitational

field around a black hole can affect the production of
matching pairs of particles and anti-particles, as is (Click for a larger version)
happening all the time in apparently empty space Hawking radiation as particle
according to quantum theory. If the particles are pairs are created near a black
created just outside the event horizon of a black hole
(Source: University of St
hole, then it is possible that the positive member of Andrews: http://www.st-
andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/fibre.html)
the pair (say, an electron) may escape - observed as
thermal radiation emitting from the black hole - while
the negative particle (say, a positron, with its negative energy and negative mass)
may fall back into the black hole, and in this way the black hole would gradually
lose mass. This was perhaps one of the first ever examples of a theory which
synthesized, at least to some extent, quantum mechanics and general relativity.

A corollary of this, though, is the so-called “Information Paradox” or “Hawking

Paradox”, whereby physical information (which roughly means the distinct identity
and properties of particles going into a black hole) appears to be completely lost to
the universe, in contravention of the accepted laws of physics (sometimes referred to
as the "law of conservation of information"). Hawking vigorously defended this
paradox against the arguments of Leonard Susskind and others for almost thirty
years, until he famously retracted his claim in 2004, effectively conceding defeat to
Susskind in what had become known as the "black hole war". Hawking's latest line of
reasoning is that the information is in fact conserved, although perhaps not in our
observable universe but in other parallel universes in the multiverse as a whole.

Unfortunately, Susskind's proposed solution is even more difficult, and almost

impossible to envisage or explain in an understandable way. He suggests that, as an
object falls into a black hole, a copy of the information that makes it up is sort of
scrambled and smeared in two dimensions around the edge of the black hole.
Furthermore, Susskind believes that a similar process occurs in the universe as a
whole, which raises the rather alarming idea that what we think of as three-
dimensional reality is in fact something like a holographic representation of a "real"
reality, which is actually contained in two dimensions around the edge of
the universe.

It is also theoretically possible that "primordial" or "mini" black holes could have been
created in the conditions during the early moments after the Big Bang, possibly in
huge numbers. No such mini black holes have ever been observed, however -
indeed, they would be extremely difficult to spot - and they remain largely
speculative. It is anyway likely that all but the largest of them would have already
evaporated by now as they leak away Hawking radiation. According to Hawking's
theory, the amount of mass lost is greater for small black holes, and so quantum-
sized black holes would evaporate over very short time-scales. But it is hoped that
such mini black holes might be experimentally re-created in the extreme conditions
of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which, among other things, would lend much-
needed credence to some of the current theoretical predictions of superstring
theory regarding gravity.