Wheeler and Oppenheimer views on stars’ implosion

Wheeler filled in the missing gaps in the Chandrasekhar and Oppenheimer–Volkoff calculations, and had confirmed their conclusions: Implosion is compulsory when a star more massive than about 2 Suns dies, and the implosion cannot produce a white dwarf, or a neutron star, or any other kind of cold, dead star, unless the dying star ejects enough mass to pull itself below the maximum-mass limit of about 2 Suns.

Wheeler described Oppenheimer’s view that massive stars must die by imploding to form black holes, and then he opposed it: Such implosion “does not give an acceptable answer,” Wheeler asserted. Why not? For essentially the same reason as Eddington had rejected it; in Eddington’s words, “there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.” 

Wheeler’s speculation was this. Since (in his view) implosion to a black hole must be rejected as physically implausible, “there seems no escape from the conclusion that the nucleons neutrons and protons at the center of an imploding star must necessarily dissolve away into radiation, and that this radiation must escape from the star fast enough to reduce its mass below about 2 Suns” and permit it to wind up in the neutron-star graveyard. 

Oppenheimer affirmed his own view: “I do not know whether non-rotating masses much heavier than the sun really occur in the course of stellar evolution; but if they do, I believe their implosion can be described in the framework of general relativity without asserting new laws of physics. Would not the simplest assumption be that such masses undergo continued gravitational contraction and ultimately cut themselves off more and more from the rest of the Universe that is, form black holes?”