How are blackholes created?
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When you’re at the Earth’s surface, it’s really hard to fly straight up. If you get further up, it becomes easier and easier to fly away because you’re further away from all of Earth’s mass and the pull of gravity is weaker.
It’s possible to imagine Earth being so dense and heavy that a rocket on its surface couldn’t take off, no matter how powerful its engines were. Eventually, there could be an object so heavy that even light, or other things moving at the speed of light, can’t get away.
That’s what a black hole is. Something so dense that, once you get close enough, the gravity is enough that even light cannot escape.
To make one, you’d have to smash some amount of matter together so hard that that radius of inescapability is bigger than the radius of the matter itself. In nature, that might be when an already ultra-dense neutron star hits something else, or maybe when a star collapses after a supernova. At CERN, it’s *possible*, but not yet demonstrated, that we could slam two particles into each other hard enough to make a black hole smaller than an atom.
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