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[freeztar]

Originally Posted by litespeed

This is something of a trojan horse sort of post. Specifically, I already suspect the answer is no, but am not sure. However, assuming a Neutron star can not become a black hole through accretion of additional mass, that means Black Holes are generally created through momentum as the minimum mass needed accelerates in the initial collapse.

From the wiki on neutron stars:

A typical neutron star has a mass between 1.35 and about 2.1 solar masses, with a corresponding radius of about 12 km if the Akmal-Pandharipande-Ravenhall (APR) Equation of state (EOS) is used.[1][2] In contrast, the Sun's radius is about 60,000 times that. Neutron stars have overall densities predicted by the APR EOS of 3.7 × 1017 (2.6 × 1014 times Solar density) to 5.9 × 1017 kg/m³ (4.1 × 1014 times Solar density),[3] which compares with the approximate density of an atomic nucleus of 3 × 1017 kg/m³.[4] The neutron star's density varies from below 1 × 109 kg/m³ in the crust increasing with depth to above 6 or 8 × 1017 kg/m³ deeper inside.[5]

In general, compact stars of less than 1.44 solar masses, the Chandrasekhar limit, are white dwarfs; above 2 to 3 solar masses (the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit), a quark star might be created, however this is uncertain. Gravitational collapse will always occur on any star over 5 solar masses, inevitably producing a black hole.

Originally Posted by litespeed

1) Does this mass accelerated by gravity increase as it approaches the speed of light, thus increasing the mass and gravity of the BH?

Originally Posted by wiki

The resulting force of gravity is so strong that if an object were to fall from just one meter high it would hit the surface of the neutron star at 2 thousand kilometers per second, or 4.3 million miles per hour

Since the speed of light is 670,616,629 mph, relativistic effects would be negligible.