High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In Einstein's
theory of general relativity, the Schwarzschild solution (or the
Schwarzschild vacuum) describes the gravitational field outside a
spherical, non-rotating mass such as a (non-rotating) star, planet,
or black hole. It is also a good approximation to the gravitational
field of a slowly rotating body like the Earth or Sun. The
cosmological constant is assumed to equal zero. In the theory of
Lorentzian manifolds, spherically symmetric spacetimes admit a
family of nested round spheres. In such a spacetime, a particularly
important kind of coordinate chart is the Schwarzschild chart, a
kind of polar spherical coordinate chart on a static and
spherically symmetric spacetime, which is adapted to these nested
round spheres. The defining characteristic of Schwarzschild chart
is that the radial coordinate possesses a natural geometric
interpretation in terms of the surface area and Gaussian curvature
of each sphere. However, radial distances and angles are not
accurately represented.
