Just a quick explanation of how black holes form, and what they are at their core.
The real trick to black holes is wrapping your head around the concept of nothing. More specifically, something being so heavy that it crushes itself. You might have seen where buildings collapse when their foundations are worn away and damaged. That is an adequate description of what happens in a black hole, only the foundations are atoms. Once something is so heavy that it crushes those, then nothing can hold it up anymore, literally. Then it crushes itself to nothing. It's a little hard to conceptualize, as there is nothing on Earth that is similar. But try thinking about this: A trash compactor takes a lot of trash and crushes into a conveniently sized cube. Now imagine that every time it ran the trash compactor crushed the trash into a smaller cube, until finally the trash will be in a single point, like a dot on a piece of paper.
That's basically what happens when a massive star dies. But instead of a hydraulic pistons, it is crushed under the weight of clouds thousands of miles thick, with several times more mass that is in our sun. The core collapses into a single point, and there is enough weight to break apart the very atoms that make up the core of the star. Its like cutting out the support and foundations of a building: there is nothing left holding it up, so the building collapses into nothing.
Except in this case, there is nothing left when the collapse is done.
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