What are the distinguishing characteristics of individual black holes?

[Humberto]

Two such characteristics might be its location and its mass.

Are there any other distinguishing characteristics?

To my understanding, a black hole cannot be identified from what's happening inside it.

One might be able to distinguish one star from another by the proportion of different elements inside the star, or the temperature of the star, or the colour that it shines, but you cannot do this with black holes.

If you take two black holes of equal mass and shuffle them around in space, can they be distinguished from each other after that?

 

[copacetic]

Each black hole will have a different gravitational effect on the objects/light in its vicinity, I assume?

 

[Humberto]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hair_theorem:

The no-hair theorem postulates that all black hole solutions of the Einstein-Maxwell equations of gravitation and electromagnetism in general relativity can be completely characterized by only three externally observable classical parameters: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum. All other information (for which "hair" is a metaphor) about the matter which formed a black hole or is falling into it, "disappears" behind the black-hole event horizon and is therefore permanently inaccessible to external observers. Physicist John Archibald Wheeler expressed this idea with the phrase "black holes have no hair" which was the origin of the name.

There is still no rigorous mathematical proof of the no-hair theorem, and mathematicians refer to it as the no-hair conjecture.

 

[Unhappy438]

Each black hole will have a different gravitational effect on the objects/light in its vicinity, I assume?

Which would fall into the mass characteristic that Humberto gave us.


@ Humberto , research "Schwarzschild black hole" and a "Kerr black hole" . These are also characteristics of black holes. Basically the Schwarzschild has no spin and the Kerr has spin, this is because the star was rotating or wasnt rotating when the hole formed. A schwarzchild can also be an old Kerr as you can have a conversion.

 

[copacetic]

Which would fall into the mass characteristic that Humberto gave us.

Oh, right. Then I don't have the slightest potato.