A slightly different kind of supernova explosion occurs when even larger, hotter stars (blue giants and blue supergiant) reach the end of their short, dramatic lives. These stars are hot enough to burn not just hydrogen and helium as fuel, but also carbon, oxygen and silicon. Eventually, the fusion in these stars forms the element iron (which is the most stable of all nuclei, and will not easily fuse into heavier elements), which effectively ends the nuclear fusion process within the star. Lacking fuel for fusion, the temperature of the star decreases and the rate of collapse due to gravity increases, until it collapse completely on itself, blowing out material in a massive supernova explosion.
If the mass of the compressed remnant of the star exceeds about 3 - 4 solar masses, then even the degeneracy pressure of neutrons is insufficient to halt the collapse and, instead of forming a neutron star, the core collapses completely into a gravitational singularity, a single point containing all the mass of the entire original star. The gravity in such a phenomenon is so strong that it overwhelms all other forces, to the extent that even light cannot escape from it, hence the name black hole. Thus, the gravity of a body just a few times denser than a neutron star would result in its inevitable further collapse into a black hole.
Although singularity at the centre of a black hole is infinitely dense, the black hole itself is not necessarily huge, as is sometimes assumed. A black hole with the mass of our Sun, for example, would have a radius of just three kilometers (roughly two hundred million times smaller than the Sun), while one with the mass of the Earth would fit in the palm of your hand! Having said that, black holes can grow to great size over time as they assimilate more and more matter and even other black holes, and some do become extremely massive.
Contrary to popular belief, a black hole does not just "suck up" everything around it in an uncontrolled orgy of destruction: it actually exerts no more gravitational pull on the objects around it than the original star from which it was formed, and any objects orbiting the original star (and which survived the supernova blast) would now orbit a black hole instead (an object would need to approach quite close to a black hole before being sucked in). The very largest blue stars may skip even the supernova stage, so that even their outer shells become incorporated into the singularity.
By definition, we cannot observe black holes directly, but they can be detected by the gravitational effect they exert on other bodies or on light rays. This is especially easy to spot in the case of binary star systems where an ordinary star is orbiting around a black hole. In the early 1990s, Reinhard Genzel pioneered this work, using the then new technique of adaptive optics to plot and track the motions of stars near the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy, to show that they must be orbiting a very massive, but invisible, object. From the immense speed with which the stars closest to the centre of the galaxy are orbiting - millions of kilometers per hour - we know that there is a "Super massive black hole" (known as Sagittarius A) at the centre of the Milky Way, with a mass of around 2 - 4 million times that of our Sun. In addition, in the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are many millions of black holes of at least ten solar masses each.
Super massive black holes lurk in the center of most galaxies, forming the hubs around which the galaxies rotate. In fact, from observations of the intense radiation of gases swirling around them at close to the speed of light, we can infer that there are much larger super massive black holes in the center of other galaxies, some of them weighing as much as several billion suns. The black hole at the centre of a galaxy known as M87 has a mass estimated at around 20 billion solar masses, and may be as large as our entire Solar System.
It seems likely that the early universe, in which very large, short-lived stars were the norm, was scattered with many, many black holes, which gradually merged together over time, creating larger and larger black holes. Observations have shown that is not uncommon for two black holes to swirl around each other in a kind of cosmic dance as their gravitational fields interact. The ripples in space-time caused by two black holes orbiting around each other - typically in a three-leaved clover shape or more complex multi-pass configuration, rather than the simple orbit of an electron within an atom, and ever-smaller and faster as the two objects inevitably approach each other - can be recorded visually and even audibly.
In the case of the largest events, moments after the creation of a black hole, the heat and the hugely amplified magnetic field of the collapsing star combine to focus a pair of tight beams or jets of radiation, perpendicular to the spinning plane of the accretion disk. These beams focus vast amounts o