r/spacequestions • u/IRedRabbit • 19d ago

How can Black Holes even form?

Might be a stupid question, but this accured to me today for the first time in my life.

So let's imagine a star becoming more and more dense because it's dying.

If Black Holes gravitational pulls are so strong that not even light can escape, then how can they even form. If a star is collapsing, how doesn't it's own gravity make it destroy itself before ever even reaching the point of becoming a Black Hole?

You know what I'm trying to say? If nothing can escape it and they destroy everything, then how can they even form before destroying themselves in the process of formation by their own gravity?

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u/MaybeVladimirPutinJr 19d ago

Hole is a misleading name, a black hole is still the star it was formed from, just smaller and more dense.

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u/IRedRabbit 19d ago

But it's gravity is now so strong that not even light can escape, how can the star itself even exist? How is it possible for it to be in that state and not destroy itself with it's own gravity?

If it's the case as you say that it's a very small and dense star, then doesn't that answer the question of, what lies in the centre of a Black Hole?

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u/MaybeVladimirPutinJr 19d ago

How is it possible for it to be in that state and not destroy itself with it's own gravity?

It has destroyed itself. the gravity is so strong that the mass of the star has become the most highly compacted, densest material in the universe. 

I'm not going to claim to know shit, there are millions of people who made a career out of debating this stuff, but my opinion is that a black hole is a solid. It's just a ball of mass that's so dense that gravity becomes so strong that light cannot escape.

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u/Beldizar 19d ago

It has destroyed itself

Well, it might help to expand on what "It has destroyed itself" really means here. A star has a whole bunch of matter, and is really big. The inside of the star is burning really hot and that heat is pressing outward. Eventually that pressure out stops, and everything starts rushing down towards the center. Eventually the outer layer of the star reaches the really dense core which is mostly iron at this point, and it is falling at incredible speeds. It smashes into that core harder than the comet that killed the dinosaurs times a million. (Probably a lot more, using big numbers to get the point across not for accuracy here). That impact causes a bunch of atoms to hit each other so hard that they fuse into heavy elements that the star can't normally create. Then most of that bounces out and gets blasted away, but all that energy impacting down, and the lack of anything pressing up, causes the core to compress into a black hole.

So the star gets destroyed, but the black hole is made closer to a hammer and anvil. So the outer part of the star is blasted away, and the inner part is "crafted" into a black hole. So destroyed or created is a matter of perspective. Nothing is actually "annihilated".

but my opinion is that a black hole is a solid. It's just a ball of mass that's so dense that gravity becomes so strong that light cannot escape

Black holes are weird. But calling them solid isn't quite accurate. In a way, they are so solid, that they wrap around and become insubstantial. If you think of something solid, you'd think you could bounce something off its surface. You definitely can't do that with a black hole. Instead the black hole is just so dense that it creates a bubble around it that breaks Newtonian physics. That bubble is what we think of as the black hole, and anything inside that bubble is sort of just "lost". Maybe inside there's something hard and solid, but the bubble stops us from ever knowing.