are burn addresses the same as normal addresses in terms of format and creation?
Burning addresses are normal addresses, but no one ever hashed a public key to get the final result. They just wrote it themselves. For instance, the above address' 160 bit hash is - 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000. No one knows the public key that once hashed with SHA256 and RIPEMD-160 gives this as a message digest, but it's indeed a valid address.
Any address' hash between - 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 and - ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff is valid.
As for the address detection, I'll just quote myself;
So, to be able to detect an address, you have to decode it and check if it has the above requirements; if the twice hashed prefix along with the next 40 hexadecimal characters begin with the last 4 bytes of the decoded address.