Eli5: How do blackholes form and exist?
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They exist because nothing stops them from existing and something causes them to exist.
Black holes are regions of spacetime where, according to Einstein’s field equations, the density of matter in a region of space is so great that not even light can escape.
Scientists in the 1930s predicted that once bodies of matter reached a certain mass, the gravitational pull would overcome any of the forces stopping it from collapsing into a singularity. Stars that were large enough could form these conditions when they died in a supernova.
Since then, even really big and heavy black holes have been found. These are assumed to have formed early on in the universe – so called primordial black holes, and they could merge and combine into supermassive black holes that we observe at the centre of galaxies.
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