How do they work, like I’m just confused I don’t understand anything about them
In: Physics
It’s an admittedly mind-bending concept. But ultimately, it’s just a very dense, very massive object. It’s so dense that the gravity generated from its mass will not let anything escape, not even light.
The most common way for these to happen is a supernova, or a very large star exploding. That leaves behind the super-dense core of the star, which was compressed both by the star’s own weight and the star exploding. If that core got dense enough, it will become a black hole.
For example, let’s imagine earth. It has enough gravitational pull that nearby asteroids can be pulled off their course by the earth, but rockets can still escape earth’s gravity well. If earth had 100x the mass, it would have 100x the gravity. That’s enough to make even the best rockets unable to escape; they just don’t have the speed and would fall back down to the surface. At 100,000x the mass, you could probably measure light’s path being extremely slightly bent as it passes. (IRL earth does theoretically bend light, but it’s such a small effect that we can’t measure it.) At roughly 1,000,000,000x the mass, it could significantly bend light’s path much like earth currently bends a nearby asteroid’s path. At roughly 10,000,000,000,000x earth’s mass (1 with 13 zero’s), an earth-sized object would have so much gravity that not even light could escape; it’d be like a rocket ship at 100x gravity, where it could get off the surface of the object, but it couldn’t actually escape.
(Those Numbers used are probably off, as I didn’t actually calculate the mass of an earth-sized black hole, but they’re good enough for this illustration.)
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