Question: How are black holes created????

Alexander Burke answered on 2 Mar 2018:

This is such a brilliant question! I honestly don’t know where to start with answering this one…

Here we go.

First of all, black holes are objects in space where the gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape!

Let’s break this down. Light is fast… seriously fast. If you were a light beam then you could travel around the earth roughly 7 times in one second. It travels approximately 186,000 miles per second! So, once light falls into a black hole, it cannot “crawl” back out!

Now, light is the fastest thing in our universe. Imagine if I now fell into a black hole… there is no chance I’ll ever be able to get back out! In ultra cool terms… The centres of black holes are infinite curvatures of space and time.

The question though, how are black holes created? Well, black holes can be created from most of the stars in the sky… let’s take a typical star such that it is 20 times the mass of our sun. The insides of the stars are in a constant battle between gravity pulling the star in and pressure (from big explosions in the star) pushing out. As time goes on, the stars “fuel” which creates the explosions start to run out and then gravity wins!

When gravity wins, the star eventually collapses under its own gravity it produces an absolutely incredible explosion (bigger than any explosion you can think of!) called a supernova. The outer bit is blown off (the wispy fiery part) and the inner core is left. If the inner core is really heavy and small then there is no outward force that can stop it collapsing in.

This is how black holes in the universe are created =).

I hope this has answered your question! Feel free to fire me any more if you’re interested!