We review the first modern singularity theorem, published by Penrose in 1965. This is the first genuine post-Einsteinian result in general relativity, where the fundamental and fruitful concept of the closed trapped surface was introduced. We include historical remarks, an appraisal of the theorem's impact, and relevant current and future work that belongs to its legacy.

We present a perturbative treatment of gravitational wave memory. The coordinate invariance of Einstein's equations leads to a type of gauge invariance in perturbation theory. As with any gauge invariant theory, results are more clear when expressed in terms of manifestly gauge invariant quantities. Therefore we derive all our results from the perturbed Weyl tensor rather than the perturbed metric. We derive gravitational wave memory for the Einstein equations coupled to a general energy-momentum tensor that reaches null infinity.

Motivated by the duality with thermalization in field theory, we study gravitational collapse of a minimally coupled massless scalar field in Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant. We investigate the system numerically and establish that for small values of the initial amplitude of the scalar field there is no black hole formation, rather, the scalar field performs an oscillatory motion typical of geodesics in Anti de Sitter. For large enough values of the amplitude of the scalar field, we find black hole formation, which we detect numerically as the emergence of an apparent horizon. Using the time of formation as an estimate for thermalization in the field theory, we conclude that thermalization occurs very rapidly, close to the causal bound for a very wide range of black hole masses. We further study the thermalization time in more detail as a function of the amplitude and the width of the initial Gaussian scalar field profile and detect a rather mild structure.

We study gravitational collapse of a spherically symmetric scalar field in Einstein-aether theory (general relativity coupled to a dynamical unit timelike vector field). The initial value formulation is developed, and numerical simulations are performed. The collapse produces regular, stationary black holes, as long as the aether coupling constants are not too large. For larger couplings a finite area singularity occurs. These results are shown to be consistent with the stationary solutions found previously.