system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What’s the minimum density needed to form a black hole?

Is this a stupid question? Or does it depend? I thought that the answer is constant, but when I googled it I couldn’t find the answer, only irrelevant things, can someone answer this question?

Edit: aight guys this is solved thanks for the help.
gpt
To *form* a black hole, you need to squish some mass into a volume less than its Schwarzschild radius. This doesn't actually correspond to any specific density. In fact, the more mass you have, the *lower* average density you need to squish something small enough for it to form a black hole. If you double the mass of an object, you double its Schwarzschild radius, and it comes out that you then only need 1/4 of the density.

Once a black hole has formed, its density becomes a bit of a trickier concept - you can talk about its "average" density (mass divided by volume within the event horizon), or the density of the singularity (which is infinite), but that's different to the density required to *form* a black hole.