>>715174612
black holes are stars that are usually at least 3-4 times the mass of our own sun. Stars keep burning and keep their shape by an incredibly delicate balance of constant nuclear fusion (think millions of hydrogen bombs going off every second) versus its own weight trying to crush its core.
When a star that big runs out of hydrogen and helium to continue nuclear fusion, gravity wins and the star collapses in on itself. Smaller stars simply burn out, stars like ours expand into red giants, and larger stars implode in a supernova sending its shell flying through the solar system and leaving behind the core which usually becomes a white dwarf or neutron star. Anything heavier can’t keep its shape and collapses into a black hole, all of the matter gets crushed into a singular point with infinite density.
Fundamentally because nothing can escape from the event horizon, it is functionally impossible to actually retrieve any information about what has passed through it. Black holes themselves only have three “observable” properties: mass (what fell in and how much gravity it exerts), spin (conservation of the angular momentum of anything that fell in it), and charge.
