All sorts of weird and wonderful things can happen when a star dies, such as neutron stars and white dwarfs. Undoubtedly the weirdest of them all, however, are the birth of stellar black holes. Like all the best enigmas of the universe, black holes are as misunderstood as they are mysterious and as hard to observe as they are to comprehend.
Stellar black holes are most commonly formed from the remnants of particularly massive stars when they die - their cores collapsing with a staggering force that defies our understanding of the laws of physics.
As the star's mass is forced into an ever-smaller space, the gravitational forces involved effectively rips a hole in the fabric of the universe creating a singularity - the point at which all calculations break down, resulting in infinite loop instead of a number. The end result? The total and utter annihilation of matter and an 'ERROR' screen on the physicist's calculator.
