Question: How are Black Holes created?

Clare Burrage answered on 14 Mar 2012:

Black holes are made whenever too much stuff ends up in one place. Often this happens when a star runs out of energy and stops burning. When the star is burning it’s very hot and this makes the gas inside the star very highly pressured, and this high pressure stops the outer parts of the star from falling into the center. But when a star stops burning this pressure disapears and all the outer parts of the star collapse to the center. All of the stuff that made up the star gets squashed in to a small area a couple of km across. This makes it so dense that nothing can get out, not even light – that’s why we call it a black hole.

You can make a black hole out of anything if you can compress it enough. But you would have to suish it a lot! To make a black hole from the Earth you would have to squeeze everything on Earth into a space less than a mm across.