By the "No Hair Theorem", three quantities "define" a black hole; Mass, Angular Momentum, and Charge. The first is easy enough to determine, look at the radius of the event horizon and you can use the Schwarzschild formula to compute the mass. Angular Momentum can be found using the cool little ergosphere Penrose "discovered". However, I don't know how to determine the charge of the black hole.
How can an electromagnetic field escape the event horizon of a Reissner-Nordström black hole? Is there any experiment we could theoretically do to a black hole to determine its charge?
Best Answer
A charged black hole does produce an electric field. In fact, at great distances (much larger than the horizon), the field strength is $Q/(4\pi\epsilon_0 r^2)$, just like any other point charge. So measuring the charge is easy.
As for how the electric field gets out of the horizon, the best answer is that it doesn't: it was never in the horizon to begin with! A charged black hole formed out of charged matter. Before the black hole formed, the matter that would eventually form it had its own electric field lines. Even after the material collapses to form a black hole, the field lines are still there, a relic of the material that formed the black hole.
A long time ago, back when the American Journal of Physics had a question-and-answer section, someone posed the question of how the electric field gets out of a charged black hole. Matt McIrvin and I wrote an answer, which appeared in the journal. It pretty much says the same thing as the above, but a bit more formally and carefully.
Actually, I just noticed a mistake in what Matt and I wrote. We say that the Green function has support only on the past light cone. That's actually not true in curved spacetime: the Green function has support in the interior of the light cone as well. But fortunately that doesn't affect the main point, which is that there's no support outside the light cone.