How can a star create a black hole

I am confused by the math involved. How can a star, which is made up of a finite amount of material, let's say a mass of a billion tons, create a black hole that has infinite properties (gravitational singularity: the space time curvature becomes infinite)? That is, how can an object that is NOT infinite create something that IS infinite or has infinite qualities?

How can a star create a black hole?

If the gravitational pull on the surface of the star is greater than the Fermi repulsion between the particles that constitute the material, then there's no force to counter the collapse and you end up with a black hole.

The reason that people, asteroids, planets, moons, main sequence stars, white dwarf stars and neutron stars are able to stabilize in their dimensions is because the repulsion between particles is strong enough to counter the gravitational pull that each parcel of matter feels from all the nearby matter of the body. In the case of neutron stars, it's the neutrons that exert the repulsion through neutron degeneracy pressure (due to the Fermi exclusion principle); in the case of white dwarfs, it's electron degeneracy pressure; in the case of main sequence stars, it's the gas pressure (collisions between ions inside the star); in all other examples, it's the normal electrostatic repulsion between molecules that you experience in day-to-day life as matter being "solid". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwU…


how can an object that is NOT infinite create something that IS infinite or has infinite qualities?

People don't know what goes on INSIDE the EVENT HORIZON, which is finite (it has a size, which is given by the Schwarzschild radius). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschi… Because we don't know, we ASSUME that since no force was able to counteract gravitational contraction, it ought to continue past the contraction towards the event horizon. But people don't KNOW what goes on inside; it could be that all matter contracted to an "infinite dense point" (whatever the hell that is), but we just don't know. The problem, of course, is trying to figure out the physics at such extreme conditions starting from what we know in "normal" conditions, so as you might expect it's very hard to figure out. The best way we know is trying to MAKE UP things and explore how it would affect the outside; but it's a little bit like searching in a maze with a lantern. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMw…