The black hole : Origin

Twentieth-century predictions that

black holes might exist naturally raised the question of how such super dense

objects could form. Over time, scientists came to realize that there might be more than one answer to this question, depending on the size of the black hole. Ever since the days of Michell and Laplace, astronomers and physicists had focused their attention on star-sized objects with extreme gravity. So the quest to understand how such bodies form concentrated on the life cycles of and physical processes within stars.

Black holes are points in space that are so dense they create deep gravity sinks. Beyond a certain region, not even light can escape the powerful tug of a black hole's gravity. And anything that ventures too close is its star, planet, or spacecraft will be stretched and compressed like putty in a theoretical process aptly known as spaghettification.

After John Wheeler coined the term black hole in 1967, several scientists began theorizing about miniature black holes. A mini black hole might be the size of an atom. Yet its matter would be so densely compacted that it would weigh something like 100 trillion tons! An even tinier black hole says the size of an atom's nucleus would still tip the scales at about a billion tons.

There are four types of black holes: stellar, intermediate, supermassive, and miniature. The most commonly known way a black hole form is by stellar death. As stars reach the ends of their lives, most will inflate, lose mass, and then cool to form white dwarfs. But the largest of these fiery bodies, those at least 10 to 20 times as massive as our sun, is destined to become either super-dense neutron stars or so-called stellar-mass black holes.

Scientists can't directly observe black holes with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We can, however, infer the presence of black holes and study them by detecting their effect on other matter nearby