Message #38708

[mccoy]

How are such bizarre objects formed?

The larger ones are the result of a sort of an arm-wrestling process. The star's internal pressure tends to project matter outside whereas the star's mass pulls matter inside .

When the latter prevails, the star sort of implodes in itself, (the so-called gravitational collapse) cramming all of its matter into a ridiculously small volume. The huge concentration of mass gives birth to an extremely strong gravitational field, which sucks everything in, and lets nothing out.

Not every star can become a black hole, our sun will become a white dwarf, some stars become neutron stars, very dense but not enough to suck in everything, and many stars will explode (supernovas), losing their outer layers before the inner layers collapse in a cosmically huge implosion.