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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).
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.
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.