In the 1930s, the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and one of his graduate students at the University of California, Hartland Snyder, proposed what seemed like a wildly improbable idea. When the nuclear fires of extremely massive stars die out, they suggested, the stars collapse so completely under the pull of their own gravity that they literally crush themselves out of existence, leaving only a "black hole" in space as evidence of their passing. Now, just as scientists are beginning to study the first tentative signs that there really may be such black holes (TIME, April 5), they are also being...
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