What is an intermediate-mass black hole? How are such objects thought to form?

The mysterious and powerful entities known as black holes are born from the deaths of massive stars. When such a star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it no longer has the energy to counteract the force of its own gravity. As a result, the star collapses under its own weight, and if the mass of the remaining core is above a certain threshold, the gravitational pull becomes so intense that it warps spacetime to create a black hole.

During this collapse, the core's particles are crushed into an infinitely dense point called a singularity, surrounded by an invisible boundary known as the event horizon. This horizon marks the point of no return, where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Scientists study the formation of black holes by observing the energy they release as they consume material and by analyzing gravitational waves from black hole mergers.

Stellar black holes are the corpses of what were once massive stars, significantly larger than our Sun. After burning through their nuclear fuel, these stars explode as supernovae, a final, cataclysmic blast that can briefly outshine entire galaxies.

The remnants, if massive enough, collapse under their own gravity to form black holes with masses typically around 5 to 20 times that of the Sun. Despite their ominous nature, stellar black holes are relatively common in the universe, though they are hard to detect unless they are interacting with other celestial bodies, such as pulling in material from a companion star. This infalling material gets heated to extreme temperatures, emitting x-rays that allow astronomers to spot these otherwise invisible objects.

Supermassive black holes are a staggering leap in scale from their stellar cousins. With masses that can be millions to billions of times that of our Sun, they typically reside at the centers of galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

The exact process by which supermassive black holes form is still a subject of intense research. However, it is believed that they may start as stellar black holes or smaller black hole seeds and grow by accreting mass from their surroundings and merging with other black holes over billions of years. Their immense gravity impacts their entire host galaxy, influencing star formation and galactic evolution. These behemoths can be detected through various means, such as observing the orbital motion of stars around a galactic center or through the emissions from material heated to extreme temperatures as it spirals into the black hole.

To truly grasp the concept of black holes, one must understand the fundamental relationship between spacetime and gravity, which is elegantly described by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Spacetime is the four-dimensional fabric of the universe, composed of three spatial dimensions and one time dimension.

Gravity is not just a force acting at a distance as Isaac Newton described, but rather, it's the effect of massive objects like stars and planets curving the spacetime around them. Objects move along the curves in spacetime, which we perceive as gravitational attraction. In the case of a black hole, the curvature becomes so steep that it forms a well from which nothing can climb out once it has passed the event horizon. This profound interaction between spacetime and gravity is at the heart of all black hole behavior.