“Are the strings so massive, then, that they can distort light so far?”
Louise said, “It isn’t really as simple as that, Uvarov. Yes, strings are massive: their width is only the Planck length, but their density is enormous—a one-inch length would have a mass of around ten million billion tons... a string stretching from Sol to Saturn, say, would have around one Solar mass. We expect strings to be found either in loops thousands of light-years across, or else they will be endless —stretched right across the Universe by the expansion from the singularity.”
-Ring, Ch. 25