ABSTRACT
The Schwarzschild solution was derived by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916. It describes the gravitational field exterior to a static, spherically symmetric, non-rotating body; in addition, it describes a non-rotating black hole. Even though it was the first exact solution of Einstein’s equations ever found, a complete understanding of the Schwarzschild spacetime was achieved much later, in the mid-sixties of the 20th century. It is interesting to know that Schwarzschild’s paper was communicated to the Berlin Academy by Einstein on the 13th of January 1916, about two months after the publication of Einstein’s seminal papers on the theory of General Relativity. The Schwarzschild solution describes not only the spacetime exterior to a static, spherical distribution of matter, but also a more mysterious object which is called black hole.
