The spectrum of known black-hole solutions to the stationary Einstein equations has been steadily increasing, sometimes in unexpected ways. In particular, it has turned out that not all black-hole-equilibrium configurations are characterized by their mass, angular momentum and global charges. Moreover, the high degree of symmetry displayed by vacuum and electro-vacuum black-hole spacetimes ceases to exist in self-gravitating non-linear field theories. This text aims to review some developments in the subject and to discuss them in light of the uniqueness theorem for the Einstein-Maxwell system.

The fate of Cauchy horizons, such as those found inside charged black holes, is intrinsically connected to the decay of small perturbations exterior to the event horizon. As such, the validity of the strong cosmic censorship (SCC) conjecture is tied to how effectively the exterior damps fluctuations. Here, we study massless scalar fields in the exterior of Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter black holes. Their decay rates are governed by quasinormal modes of the black hole. We identify three families of modes in these spacetimes: one directly linked to the photon sphere, well described by standard WKB-type tools; another family whose existence and timescale is closely related to the de Sitter horizon. Finally, a third family which dominates for near-extremally-charged black holes and which is also present in asymptotically flat spacetimes. The last two families of modes seem to have gone unnoticed in the literature. We give a detailed description of linear scalar perturbations of such black holes, and conjecture that SCC is violated in the near extremal regime.

It was recently shown that Strong Cosmic Censorship may be violated in highly charged black-hole spacetimes living in a universe with a positive cosmological constant. Several follow-up works have since suggested that such result, while conceptually interesting, cannot be upheld in practice. We focus here on the claim that the presence of charged massive scalars suffices to save Strong Cosmic Censorship. To the contrary, we show that there still exists a finite region in parameter space where Strong Cosmic Censorship is expected to be violated.

This paper is the second part of a trilogy dedicated to the following problem: given spherically symmetric characteristic initial data for the EinsteinMaxwell-scalar field system with a cosmological constant Λ, with the data on the outgoing initial null hypersurface given by a subextremal ReissnerNordström black hole event horizon, study the future extendibility of the corresponding maximal globally hyperbolic development as a "suitably regular" Lorentzian manifold.In the first paper of this sequence [4], we established well posedness of the characteristic problem with general initial data.In this second paper, we generalize the results of Dafermos [6] on the stability of the radius function at the Cauchy horizon by including a cosmological constant. This requires a considerable deviation from the strategy followed in [6], focusing on the level sets of the radius function instead of the red-shift and blue-shift regions. We also present new results on the global structure of the solution when the free data is not identically zero in a neighborhood of the origin.In the third and final paper [5], we will consider the issue of mass inflation and extendibility of solutions beyond the Cauchy horizon.