How do black holes form and what happens when matter enters them?

A black hole is like a super strong vacuum cleaner in space that never stops sucking.

Imagine you have a really big ball of stuff, like a giant snowball made of stars, and it collapses under its own weight, like when you squeeze a sponge until it’s tiny. That’s how a black hole forms. It starts as a star, but when it runs out of fuel, it explodes or collapses in on itself.

Think of the black hole as a super fast escalator going down forever. If something, like a spaceship or even you!, gets too close, it starts speeding up and gets stretched out, like taffy being pulled apart. This is called spaghettification.

If something goes all the way in, it disappears from our world, but it doesn’t vanish completely. It just gets squished into a super tiny point inside the black hole, where everything we know stops working.