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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Galethorn" data-source="post: 2269876" data-attributes="member: 7888">Well, that's what I learned in my astronomy class...You see, it doesn't take THAT much mass to form a black hole, when compared to the biggest stars, but it's considerably more than most stars have to work with (the smaller the star, the more there are like it, and the bigger the star, the fewer like it).Now, when a star is in the process of fusing anything fusable, it's got a force (heat) trying to make it fly apart in all directions, which counters the force of gravity. Most stars (like our own), when they run out of fuel, just collapse into Dwarf stars of various colors and sizes and atomic components.If a star is above that magical 1.4 solar masses (the Chandrasekhar Limit), the dwarf star has so much mass that the gravitational pressure is greater than the force that's keeping the electrons from getting mashed in with the protons (electron degeneracy pressure), and so they get mashed together, release a truly massive amount of energy (in the form of a supernova), resulting in a much smaller object of icredible mass made entirely of neutrons (a neutron star). The neutrons, however, don't collapse any more.If the star is above 3.0 solar masses (the Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit), the force of gravity is such that the neutrons collapse into an infinitely small space, and then you've got a singularity.That's how it was explained to me.As for the other comments...well, ok, everything we know now could (and probably is, the way things have been going) be part of something bigger that would let us go faster than light, and yes, maybe you could turn yourself into some massless particle that could go faster than light, but wouldn't that just be another explanation for quantum teleportation? I'm just going by what the data and theories show at the time being...multiplied (or divided?) by what part of that I've actually learned and understand.All good points on your part, though, especially when we're talking about sci-fi.</blockquote>

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