An accessible review on black holes

Black holes are among the most famous scientifically studied objects. Besides the numerous papers written about them every year, they are the subjects for much of the sci-fi genre, such as Interstellar. Furthermore, with the relatively recent imaging of two supermassive black holes, much effort has been put into explaining black holes to the public. Yet more advanced learners–such as undergraduate researchers–are caught between the limited descriptions of public-based information and the maze of complex, deeply-mathematical papers. The goal of this paper is to bridge these two areas with an accessible yet rigorous review of black holes and their accretion disks.