His exact solution revealed something startling: if enough mass were crammed into a small enough ball, a gravitational abyss would form. The spacetime curvature would become so extreme that anything venturing too close would be trapped. And because “anything” includes light, such regions would fade to black, a characteristic that inspired the early term “dark stars.” The extreme warping would also bring time to a grinding halt at the star’s edge; hence another early label, “frozen stars.” Half a century later, Wheeler, who was nearly as adept at marketing as he was at physics, popularized such
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