Approximately twelve billion years ago, the black hole had been just a massive cloud of dust and gas spread out over an enormous expanse (The Life and Death of Stars). “Dink.” A couple of the particles bump together creating a small gravitational pull. “Ping, Ping.” More particles stick to the growing form. The gravity grows with every added particle and consequently, millions of particles find themselves attracted to the developing celestial body. The friction created from the particles bumping together gives the proto-star a burning desire to combust. With a great “poof” it bursts into flame.
As it continues to grow, it evolves from red, the coolest and smallest of the stars, to yellow, orange, and finally blue, the largest and hottest type of star (O'Brien). If we were to fly into the core, we would observe hydrogen atoms being fused together, creating helium atoms and a little bit of energy (The Life and Death of Stars). When this happens to billions of hydrogen atoms simultaneously, an incredible amount of energy is released, which sustains the distant sun. As the flaming ball goes through this lengthy hydrogen-to-helium transformation, it releases uncountable numbers of particles covering every part of the spectrum. Searing hot matter is spewed into giant loops across its surface. It has graduated into a Main Sequence Star.
After a few billion years, the giant's hydrogen fuel is depleted and it slowly ceases to combust efficiently. As it cools, gravity reigns again. Friction begins to heat the particles. Helium is able to reform and create carbon (The Life and Death of Stars). As a result, the star cools slightly and alters to a different hue. Utilizing the energy created from converting the helium, the fire is re-lit and the huge star burns again.
Next, the helium runs out, the star starts to shrink; it heats up from friction, and begins to convert carbon into oxygen. As this growing and shrinking continues over decades, it slowly looses energy and becomes cooler, causing the once blue star to become red. Also, it grows to a size many times greater than when it started out.
Over the years, the distant sun uses heavier and heavier elements while slowly loosing momentum. Iron is unusable in a star because fusing iron together will not release any energy unless there is a tremendous amount of heat present (The Life and Death of a Star). Once it uses up all its other options, it starts converting elements into iron. As it gets closer to having all iron, the envelope grows into a red super-giant.
If our sun were to become a red super-giant, it would grow so large it would easily consume all the planets up to Jupiter into its molten innards (The Life and Death of Stars).
It takes two atoms of hydrogen to make one atom of helium; and it takes two atoms of helium to create carbon so therefore, at the time of our star's super-giant phase, the core of the dying star has shrunk to about the size of the earth. Super-Nova!! The earth-sized core shrinks to the size of a small town in a fraction of a second (O'Brien). Matter is ejected into the universe at just under the speed of light. The particles are spontaneously heated to nine and a half million degrees. Obviously, this is ample heat to convert iron to heavier elements. As the ex-star's matter is emitted, the iron is converted into much heavier elements such as gold, platinum, and even uranium.
The reason you can see a star after it goes Super-Nova is because the remnant of the core emits billions of highly excited particles. These, in turn, excite the previously expelled particles around them, causing them to glow red, pink, blue, and even purple; the same way electrons excite the elements in a fluorescent light bulb. A nebula has just been created.
Most of the energy is gone and gravity dominates the burnt out star. The dense core of multiple compressed elements still glows slightly but is no match for the thing that keeps us on the ground. It shrinks. Although the remnant is relatively small, it is extremely massive and therefore has a lot of gravity. One tablespoon of that core would weigh about four tons on earth. It crushes itself.
Most people think of a black hole as a giant funnel or tornado-shaped object. Actually, it is a tremendous amount of matter in a really tiny space. The matter compresses so much that the gravity is stronger than light, therefore light is trapped inside the black hole.
Our star is now a black hole and will spend the rest of its existence pulling on the universe with its growing might.
