I have long been fascinated with the mysterious black holes. Over the years I've been following the literature and improved my mathematical skills to better understand what we know about these objects. Over the past several years I followed several heated debates related to numerous paradoxes that our understanding of black holes had caused. Here I'd like to present a few issues I have with our contemporary understanding of the subject. If you are a black hole specialist, I will appreciate feedback.

Classical picture

Existence of black holes is a straightforward result of the theory of general relativity (in fact is conceivable even in the classical Newtonian mechanics). In essence the observation is that an object dense enough would eventually reach the escape velocity equal to the speed of light, at which point in becomes black (since it cannot radiate anything out) and anything that happens to get trapped inside it, has no hope of getting out, or at least has the same hope of getting out as we may have the hope of traveling faster than light. The solution of that particular object was first put forward by Karl Schwarzschild who observed that there is a particular size/radius below … Read more...