Ordinary gravity is like soft rubber. A dying massive star bends it so deeply that it forms a black hole — a trap from which nothing, not even light, escapes. Physicist Roger Penrose suggested that nature always hides the core behind such 'cosmic censorship'.

However, in a new study, scientists considered a case where spacetime behaves like a very springy rubber. Adding stiffness to the equations of gravity, they found: the star still collapses, but the membrane doesn’t seal into an impenetrable sack. Light from the center bursts out. Imagine a trampoline: a heavy ball pushes it down, but if the trampoline is too tight, the edges don’t meet, and the ball remains visible.

Such 'naked' cores aren't just an abstraction. They could reveal themselves through bursts of gravitational waves or particles, allowing astronomers to peer into the world of quantum gravity. Strikingly, the mathematical additions that stiffen the rubber appear naturally in string theory — perhaps this is happening in the real Universe.