
Blimey, where do you start. Right, stellar black holes form when a star (at least 3 times the mass of our Sun) reaches the end of it’s life and collapses in on itself due to the pull of gravity. Sometimes, it collapses to a point known as a singularity which has a gravitational pull so strong, not even light can escape, hence the name ‘blackhole’. The area around this point, that once you pass you can never escape, is called the ‘event horizon’. One theory suggests that if you were to pass across the event horizon, you’d be stretched out into a long line of atoms like a string of spaghetti. Which is why that’s called ‘Spaghettification’. Some one looking on from outside though would just see you frozen in time. We can detect blackholes by looking for their effect on the space around them. This could be by detecting huge x-ray glows of material being accelerated towards the black hole or by the way it bends the light of a star it might pass in front of. Astronomers estimate there’s around 10,000 black holes in our galaxy, including a super massive one right at the centre. This one is millions of times the mass of the Sun.