How does a black hole form. What is a black hole made up of?

If you know what a supernova is you will be able to understand this one. Ok, when a star dies it caves on it self. It also sucks in everything near it including light the only one that could form is when our star dies, the sun. but that's not for another 4 billion year according to scientist. We don't yet know if they are real or what there made up of. The only proof we have of black holes is that one time scientists saw a planet and some gases being whipped around by and 'invisible' force, a black hole there for all we know is that if black holes are real, they're extremely powerful with infinite gravity and they are invisible until you see an object being whipped around.

oh boy, at the observoatory i would both dread this question and love it. because on the one hand it is fun to answer, on the other hand, my fingers (and your brain) might be sore by the time i am done.

ok first lets discuss why exactly a star dies.

it dies because it runs out of fuel (hydrogen basically). now without enough fuel at its core it can no longer hold back the pressure of gravity. the only thing keeping a star in relative equilibrium is the balance of gravity pulling inwards and the outward pressure of the energy from fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms.

now when the hydrogen is used up then the helium begins to get fused, but this does not give off as much energy. and this goes on down the line after helium it is another heavier element and so on and so forth until finally you get to iron.

iron is quite heavy, and in order to fuse it into an even heavier element it requires more energy than that which will be released.

uh oh, that star is kinda up the creek now.

as you can imagine, because gravity is unstoppable, the iron begins to get fused thereby robbing the star of the necessary outward pressure to stop it from collapsing.

so the star beigns to collapse.

now technically there are some little intricacies here with neutrinoes and a few other things, but the end result is what we call a supernova.

basically BOOM.

well technically just a very large and fast outward expansion of the star causing the star to suddenly get brighter than the entire galaxy.

now that outer shell goes so fast that it actually continues to fuse elements for a while, all of the elements that we are made of came from a star this way (except hydrogen).

now what is left (if anything is left) has no real hope of an outward push, so all it can do is collapse.

now if it is up to 3 solar masses it will become a white dwarf, about the size of earth, but can weigh more than our sun , very dense, very hot pretty small.

if it is up to 8 solar masses, it will collapse even further, into a neutron star about 10-20 km across. composed almost entirely of neutrons this is basically a huge atomic nucleus.

if it is heavier than that, then no known force can stop its collapse. and it collapses into an infinitely dense object with zero radius.

this object is called a .. wait for it.. think you know the answer?

its a singularity.

so where is the black hole you might ask? a singularity is not a black hole. a black hole is the area around a singularity from which light cannot escape. technically a black hole is just a region of space, the singularity is the actual stellar remnant.

now, this is not the only way a black hole can be formed. there also could be black holes that are left overs from the big bang, or they could have just been vast clouds of matter that collapsed before stars could even form in them to become a huge singularity.

i hope this answers your question. if you are still confused feel free to send me an e-mail and i will try to clear up any confusion.

A black hole is basically a star that has collapsed in what is called a supernova. When a star "goes" supernova, it's internal gravity is so great that the outer regions of the star collapse inward, then rebound in a giant explosion. This explosion gives us all of the elements past Beryllium.

Now, after this explosion, some of these supernovas form black holes. A black hole, if you could see it (it's literally invisible) is a sphere. The event horizon is an area around the black hole where everything goes in, but nothing goes out (the point of no return). A black hole is defined as singularity. It is essentially infinitely small, and infinitely dense. What goes on inside a black hole? No one knows.

By the way, you stated that a black hole forms when a star burns out, but as I stated before, the black hole is a result of a gravitational collapse, not a star burning out.

Simply, a black hole is similar to a vacuum cleaner, cleaning up debris left behind in outer space. It is not suction power that makes things fall into a black hole. Suction would not be strong enough. Instead a black hole uses the power of gravity to pull things towards it.

When a large star runs out of fuel it can no longer support its heavy weight. The pressure from the star's massive layers of hydrogen press down forcing the star to get smaller and smaller and smaller. Eventually the star will get even smaller than an atom. Imagine that for a moment an entire star squashed up into less space than a tiny atom.

If you wonder how something can get smaller, but retain the same amount of mass, it is really quite simple. If you take a sponge the size of a soda can you can easily squish it in your hands until it is completely covered. But here is the interesting part. If you make something smaller by squishing it, its gravity becomes much stronger. Imagine then, if you squish a star into the size of an atom how powerful its gravity would become.

A black hole's gravity becomes so powerful that anything including light that gets too close gets pulled in.

Well, perhaps an infinitely dense singularity can exist if it is subject to quantum uncertainty, and it would be of the right order of magnitude. However, it can't ever quite form into a point of infinitesimal size; rather like a perspective view of sphere travelling ever further away, and no matter how far removed, still yet not quite a point. One view of a singularity is that it can never quite form in time, and is always in the process of being formed as all the matter that enters the event horizon ( an event horizon as measured from afar), catches up with all the matter that has already fallen in for a final big crunch, that can never happen because more matter from the future is yet to fall in. The black hole is more than just the singularity, it extends out to the event horizon which shields it from prying eyes, and the physics within might be different to the physics without. No one really knows.

stars are like humans, they are born , they live, and then they die..stars's life cycle is too long, so i will tell you how it dies,,when the star becomes a red giant, the outer layers of the star continue to expand. as this happens, the core of the star contracts; and the helium atoms in the core fuse together, and it forms carbon atoms and it releases energy. the core is now stable becuase the carbon atoms can't be compressed anymore. now the star starts to take out its outer layers, and they are drifted away in the space forming a planetary nebula. now the star has lost most of its mass to the nebula, the star starts to cool and shrink, it will eventually be only a few thousand miles in diameter.

the star is now a white dwarf, and a stable star with no cuclear fuel. it will stay bright for billions of years, but its brightness will be less. when the heat is all gone, the start will be a cold, dark black dwarf, and that means the star is dead now.

the next stage depends on the star's remaining mass:

if the star's mass is between 1 and a half to 3 times of the sun, it will collapse into a small, dense neutron star.

if the star's remaining mass is greater than 3 times the mass of the sun, the star contracts remendously and becomes a black hole............................that is how the black hole forms!! hope i helped!!

Simply, a black hole is similar to a vacuum cleaner, cleaning up debris left behind in outer space. It is not suction power that makes things fall into a black hole. Suction would not be strong enough. Instead a black hole uses the power of gravity to pull things towards it.

When a large star runs out of fuel it can no longer support its heavy weight. The pressure from the star's massive layers of hydrogen press down forcing the star to get smaller and smaller and smaller. Eventually the star will get even smaller than an atom. Imagine that for a moment an entire star squashed up into less space than a tiny atom.

If you wonder how something can get smaller, but retain the same amount of mass, it is really quite simple. If you take a sponge the size of a soda can you can easily squish it in your hands until it is completely covered. But here is the interesting part. If you make something smaller by squishing it, its gravity becomes much stronger. Imagine then, if you squish a star into the size of an atom how powerful its gravity would become.

A black hole's gravity becomes so powerful that anything including light that gets too close gets pulled in.

If a black hole could exist it would be the compressed core of an exploded massive star.

A black hole would be about a 2 solar mass sphere about 3 km in diameter whose surface gravity was such that the surface escape velocity was greater than the speed of light,since nothing could escape the surface it would br invisible.

There are a number of good reasons to believe that a black hole can't exist.

I don't really know what causes stars to die.

Actually, not all stars make black holes when they die, i dont think

I think it has something to do with the gravitational pull of the star. Like if the earth disappeared, but our gravity still was pulling (only stars have a FAR greater gravitational pull)

Really big stars make supernovas

The gravity from a star is so great that it caves in on itself. Black holes aren't really that understood. Nobody's even seen one, they just look at how other stars are effected by gravity and assume there is one there. It's just a really big theoretical scientific theory.