In 1926, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington gave a plausible description of radiative pressure in his book: The internal constitution of the stars. He asserted that the balance between gravity and radiative pressure gives the sustaining shape and size of all stellar systems which include stars like the Sun. Future researches guided by Eddington’s ideas allowed scientists like Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar to formulate theory of black holes and consequently shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 with fellow researcher William A. Fowler. However, the balance of power between gravity and radiative pressure never means that the value of each is zero. What proved is that their vectors sum to zero. In fact, there can be a net gain of radiative pressure allowing the star to shine suggesting the dynamic balance is almost tangential not between outward and inward normal vectors and the angular displacements with respect to the normal can never be zero but can at most be 90°.

On the other hand, the physics of the event horizon does allow absolute zero radiative pressure where tangential vectors can vanish completely for non-rotating black holes and gravity dominates the inward pull as the star collapses. Moreover, total internal reflection can occur, allowing enslavement of internal photons while external photons are prevented from reflecting back outward and the collapsing star appears black at absolute zero radiative pressure.