How do they work, like I’m just confused I don’t understand anything about them
In: Physics
There’s a lot to learn here! Where to start?
Stars have life stages. They spend a lot of time burning fuel and producing light. Way later, after they’ve run out of fuel and maybe gone through some other stages, stars end up condensing down at the end of their lives. They get way smaller and way denser.
The biggest stars condense down so much that they become a black hole. Black holes are basically dead stars that were super massive, so when they condensed down they became super dense. Even denser than the densest elements we know of! Atoms have empty space between the nucleus and the electron shells. But black holes are so dense that they can’t have the empty space there. So the atoms kind of condense down inwards.
Now comes the spooky part. We don’t actually know what black holes look like or what structure they have. This is because they have so much gravity that everything gets pulled in, even light itself if it’s close enough! There is a radius around a black hole that light can’t escape because it’s too close so the gravity is too strong. We call that area the “event horizon.” We call it that because outside of the event horizon we can see what’s going on. Light will get to earth and we can record the “events” that are happening. Inside the event horizon, no light can escape, so we can never really see what happens inside there. We can only make educated guesses.
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