A homogeneous, spherical cloud of cosmic dust begins to contract under its own gravity. At some point, by classical laws, it should collapse into a point of infinite density — a singularity. But in this model, things are different: when the contraction reaches its limit, quantum effects kick in, and the sphere's interior does not vanish but instead starts to expand.
Meanwhile, outside, there is emptiness that continues to fall inward. A mismatch arises: the core is already swelling while the shell is still contracting. At the boundary between them, a shock wave is born — a physical jump where the geometry of space remains continuous but its derivative suffers a discontinuity. This is like a sonic boom, but on the scale of spacetime.
The authors derived two versions of the metric for the exterior emptiness — both resemble the Schwarzschild solution but with corrections. The resulting spacetime turns out to be geodesically complete: any light ray or particle can travel through it forever without falling into a singularity. This is the first work where the birth of a regular black hole is traced from the start of collapse to the finale — all within a single theory, with no hand-tuning.
The term "black hole" was coined by a journalist, not a physicist — in 1967 at a conference, Ann Ewing first used it, but John Wheeler popularized it.
In the movie "Interstellar," the heroes pass through a black hole and enter a five-dimensional space — the new model allows travel without destruction, but without extra dimensions.