In this chapter we will continue the exploration of black holes in higher dimensions with an examination of asymptotically flat black holes with spherical horizons, i.e., in d spacetime dimensions the topology of the horizon and of spatial infinity is an Sd-2. In particular, we will focus on a family of vacuum solutions describing spinning black holes, known as Myers–Perry (MP) metrics. In many respects these solutions admit the same remarkable properties as the standard Kerr black hole in four dimensions. However, studying these solutions also begins to provide some insight into the new and unusual features of event horizons in higher dimensions.

These metrics were discovered in 1985 as a part of my thesis work as a Ph.D. student at Princeton [1]. My supervisor,Malcolm Perry, and I had been led to study black holes in higher dimensions, in part by the renewed excitement in superstring theory that had so dramatically emerged in the previous year. We anticipated that examining black holes in d > 4 dimensions would be important in obtaining a full understanding of these theories. I should add that, amongst the subsequent developments, this family of spinning black hole metrics was further generalized to include a cosmological constant as well as Newman, Unti, and Tamburino (NUT) parameters. While I will not have space to discuss these extensions, the interested reader may find a description of the generalized solutions in [2].