Kerr black hole

The term Kerr black hole refers to a particular black hole model that includes the effects of its mass and rotation but not that of electric charge, and the term is sometimes used for actual rotating black holes that closely match this model. The model was developed in the 1960s, decades subsequent to the development of black hole models dealing only with mass and charge. It is generally assumed that charged black holes rapidly lose their charge given their additional attraction of the opposite charge, and the Kerr black hole concept is a practical model for real black holes. The Kerr metric is the metric devised for the model, and Kerr spacetime refers to the spacetime model it defines.

Rotation presents a significant complication to general relativity (GR) based models, introducing frame dragging, the ergosphere, and revealing the potential for the Penrose process and Blandford-Znajek mechanism and affecting other characteristics such as the photon sphere and innermost stable circular orbit.

The Kerr-Newman black hole is an extension to the Kerr black hole model that also accommodates electric charge, also developed in the 1960s. The earlier 1920s models that accommodated only mass and only mass with charge were the Schwarzschild black hole and the Reissner-Nordström black hole.

While the Kerr black hole is based upon GR, its rotation-specific features can fit with some theoretical modifications to GR, so determining that an actual black hole shows characteristics of a Kerr black hole does not necessarily distinguish GR from some amended version of GR.