Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope’s ‘Little Red Dots.’
Astronomers built the James Webb Space Telescope to pick up faint light from the first billion years after the Big Bang, a chaotic era when vast swaths of hydrogen and helium gas gathered into the chains of galaxies we see today.
天文学家建造了詹姆斯·韦伯太空望远镜，以接收大爆炸后最初十亿年的微弱光线，这是一个混乱的时代，大量的氢和氦气聚集成我们今天看到的星系链。
Even in the telescope’s first images , astronomers could see a whole zoo of mysterious smears of light.
即使在望远镜的第一张图像中，天文学家也能看到整个动物园的神秘光斑。
One batch of objects proved especially difficult to interpret.
事实证明，一批物体特别难以解释。
They glowed blindingly bright, emitting red light with long wavelengths and shining as brilliantly as a whole galaxy.
它们发出耀眼的光芒，发出长波长的红光，如同整个星系一样璀璨夺目。
They were tiny, spanning just a pixel.
它们很小，只有一个像素。
And they were everywhere.
他们无处不在。
A couple appear in almost every image Webb takes.
韦伯拍摄的几乎每张照片中都会出现一对情侣。
In 2023, researchers started calling them “ little red dots .” Astronomers have repeatedly pointed Webb toward the little red dots, wringing precious new information from these pixels of light.
2023 年，研究人员开始称它们为“小红点”。天文学家多次将韦伯指向这些小红点，从这些光像素中获取宝贵的新信息。
Astronomers suspect that two of the mysterious objects from the early universe known as little red dots are giant stars with black holes hidden inside them.
天文学家怀疑早期宇宙中两个被称为小红点的神秘物体是巨大的恒星，其中隐藏着黑洞。
Initially, researchers thought the dots looked kind of like galaxies.
最初，研究人员认为这些点看起来有点像星系。
Later, they concluded that little red dots look more like the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of most galaxies.
后来，他们得出结论，小红点看起来更像是大多数星系中心的超大质量黑洞。
These monstrous masses are themselves dark, but their formidable gravity violently vacuums up gas and other nearby matter, generating rings of hot, swirling detritus that completely outshine the stars around them.
这些巨大的质量本身是黑暗的，但它们强大的引力猛烈地吸走了气体和其他附近的物质，产生了炽热的、旋转的碎屑环，完全使它们周围的恒星黯然失色。
Then, in the spring of 2025, two teams of astronomers simultaneously announced observations of a pair of little red dots that were unlike all the rest.
然后，在 2025 年春天，两支天文学家团队同时宣布观测到一对与其他小红点不同的小红点。
In fact, they were unlike any object ever seen.
事实上，它们与我们见过的任何物体都不一样。
“In all the millions of [observations] we’ve taken with ground-based telescopes,” said Anna de Graaff , a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and head of one group, “there’s nothing that looks like these sources.”
德国海德堡马克斯·普朗克天文学研究所研究员兼一个小组负责人安娜·德·格拉夫 (Anna de Graaff) 表示：“在我们用地面望远镜进行的数百万次观测中，没有任何东西看起来像这些来源。”
The two teams of astronomers propose that they are looking at a new astronomical object: a topsy-turvy lump of hydrogen that shines with the light of billions of suns while hiding a black hole deep in its core.
这两支天文学家团队提出，他们正在寻找一个新的天体：一个颠倒的氢块，它闪耀着数十亿颗太阳的光芒，同时在其核心深处隐藏着一个黑洞。
They call it a black hole star.
他们称之为黑洞星。
Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, suspects that many of the little red dots are giant stars with black holes hidden inside them.
德国海德堡马克斯·普朗克天文研究所的安娜·德·格拉夫怀疑，许多小红点是内部隐藏着黑洞的巨大恒星。
In a paper posted last week , astronomers took this analysis a step further.
在上周发表的一篇论文中，天文学家进一步进行了这一分析。
They argued that the Webb telescope is witnessing the births of supermassive black holes inside the cores of colossal stars.
他们认为韦伯望远镜正在见证巨大恒星核心内超大质量黑洞的诞生。
“There is a fundamentally new phenomenon afoot,” said Rohan Naidu , an astronomer at the University of Hawai‘i.
“一种全新的现象正在出现，”夏威夷大学天文学家罗汉·奈杜 (Rohan Naidu) 说。
But not everyone agrees with this bold interpretation.
但并不是所有人都同意这种大胆的解释。
It has sparked a flurry of follow-up research and reignited a fierce debate over the nature of these peculiar pinpricks of light.
它引发了一系列后续研究，并重新引发了关于这些奇特的光点性质的激烈争论。
“The field has gotten very polarized,” said Anna-Christina Eilers , an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies little red dots.
“这个领域已经变得非常两极分化，”麻省理工学院研究小红点的天体物理学家安娜-克里斯蒂娜·艾勒斯说。
When all you can see is a speck, it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at.
当你只能看到一个斑点时，就很难分辨你在看什么。
All you know about it is its color and brightness.
你所知道的只是它的颜色和亮度。
Astronomers first argued that little red dots were distant galaxies on the cosmic horizon, mainly because of their brightness.
天文学家首先认为小红点是宇宙地平线上的遥远星系，主要是因为它们的亮度。
But galaxies that bright would have to be huge — and there was no known way for them to grow so big in just hundreds of millions of years.
但如此明亮的星系必须是巨大的——而且目前还没有已知的方法可以让它们在短短数亿年内变得如此之大。
Astronomers dubbed them “universe breakers” for the way they seemed to demolish the standard cosmic timeline.
天文学家称它们为“宇宙破坏者”，因为它们似乎摧毁了标准的宇宙时间线。
Then they took a closer look.
然后他们仔细观察。
De Graaff led one survey, called Red Unknowns: Bright Infrared Extragalactic Survey (Rubies), and Naidu co-led another survey, called Mirage or Miracle (MOM).
德格拉夫领导了一项名为“红色未知：明亮红外河外巡天”（红宝石）的调查，奈杜共同领导了另一项名为“海市蜃楼或奇迹”（MOM）的调查。
These were two of a wave of surveys that trained Webb telescope on distant objects, including little red dots, for hours at a time.
这是一系列调查中的两次，这些调查将韦伯望远镜一次训练几个小时来观察遥远的物体，包括小红点。
They tabulated precisely what shades of light were coming from each dot, and how bright the shades were.
他们精确地列出了每个点发出的光的色调以及色调的亮度。
This detailed color breakdown, known as a spectrum, told astronomers a far more detailed story than the initial observations had.
这种详细的颜色分解（称为光谱）向天文学家讲述了比最初观察到的更详细的故事。
Different atoms shine in subtly different hues, so the spectrum provided a sense of what the object’s particles were doing.
不同的原子发出细微不同的色调，因此光谱可以让我们了解物体的粒子正在做什么。
The bombshell discovery in the little red dot spectra was that the colors of hydrogen were smeared out across multiple shades.
小红点光谱中的爆炸性发现是氢的颜色被涂抹在多种色调上。
Usually, seeing such an effect means you’re looking straight at an exposed black hole.
通常，看到这种效果意味着您正在直视暴露的黑洞。
Black holes whip hydrogen clouds around them at furious rates, with the clouds emitting slightly different colors depending on their speed.
黑洞以惊人的速度鞭打它们周围的氢云，根据速度的不同，氢云发出的颜色略有不同。
The net effect is that instead of seeing just the hue of hydrogen, you see a range of colors called a broad line.
最终效果是，您看到的不仅仅是氢的色调，而是一系列称为宽线的颜色。
The wider this range, the faster the fastest hydrogen clouds are flying — and the more massive the black hole.
这个范围越宽，最快的氢云飞行得越快，黑洞的质量也越大。
Many astronomers concluded that big black holes dotted the universe, washing out the light of the stars in their host galaxies.
许多天文学家得出的结论是，大黑洞遍布宇宙，洗掉了宿主星系中恒星的光芒。
As black holes, the little red dots would appear red because dust — grainy stuff much more complicated than gas — was blocking their blue light.
作为黑洞，这些小红点会呈现红色，因为尘埃（比气体复杂得多的粒状物质）阻挡了它们的蓝光。
Yet they still seemed weird.
但他们看起来仍然很奇怪。
Most supermassive black holes flicker as they gulp down chunky streams of gas around them.
大多数超大质量黑洞在吞噬周围的大块气体流时都会闪烁。
They also beam powerful X-rays across the universe.
它们还会向整个宇宙发射强大的 X 射线。
Most little red dots seemed to be doing neither of these things.
大多数小红点似乎都没有做这些事情。
But that didn’t trouble astronomers much; they expected to see some strangeness during the pandemonium of the early universe.
但这并没有给天文学家带来太大困扰。他们期望在早期宇宙的混乱中看到一些奇怪的现象。
And at least the black holes weren’t breaking any cosmological theories.
至少黑洞没有破坏任何宇宙学理论。
Then, in the spring of 2025, de Graaff and Naidu’s teams unveiled the two strangest dots yet.
然后，在 2025 年春天，德格拉夫和奈杜的团队揭开了迄今为止最奇怪的两个点的面纱。
What made these two little red dots exceptional was how red they were.
这两个小红点之所以与众不同，是因为它们的红色。
Webb picked up almost no light in the bluer hues of their spectra.
韦伯几乎没有接收到光谱中蓝色色调的光。
And at a particular shade of red, the colors abruptly got much, much brighter.
在特定的红色色调下，颜色突然变得非常非常明亮。
This feature, known as a Balmer break, is something you see when looking at a hot ball of hydrogen gas — typically, certain types of stars or galaxies (which are made of many stars).
这种特征被称为巴尔默断裂，是你在观察热氢气球时看到的东西——通常是某些类型的恒星或星系（由许多恒星组成）。
Deep in a star’s core, nuclear fusion pumps out heat and light, which slowly filters up to the star’s surface.
在恒星核心深处，核聚变会释放出热量和光，然后慢慢渗透到恒星表面。
There, hydrogen atoms can become energized in a way that blocks bluer light and lets through only redder light.
在那里，氢原子可以以一种阻挡蓝光并只允许红光通过的方式被激发。
These red colors have a hump-shaped spectrum that reveals the overall temperature of the star’s surface.
这些红色具有驼峰形光谱，可以揭示恒星表面的整体温度。
But the new little red dots couldn’t literally be stars — they were way too bright.
但新的小红点实际上不可能是星星——它们太亮了。
And they didn’t look much like black holes either.
而且它们看起来也不太像黑洞。
Black holes have an assortment of ringlike structures of different temperatures.
黑洞具有各种不同温度的环状结构。
They don’t typically produce a Balmer break, or the red, hump-shaped curve indicative of a stellar surface burning at a uniform 5,000 or so degrees Kelvin.
它们通常不会产生巴尔默断裂，或者指示恒星表面以 5,000 开氏度左右均匀燃烧的红色驼峰形曲线。
Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the University of Hawai‘i, co-led a survey team that discovered the reddest little red dot yet.
夏威夷大学天文学家罗汉·奈杜 (Rohan Naidu) 领导的一个调查小组发现了迄今为止最红的小红点。
He suggests it’s a member of a whole new class of astrophysical object.
他认为它是一类全新天体物理物体的成员。
Naidu and de Graaff concluded that they were looking at the first examples of something combining the vigor of a black hole with the outward appearance of a star: a black hole star.
奈杜和德格拉夫得出的结论是，他们正在研究将黑洞的活力与恒星的外观相结合的第一个例子：黑洞恒星。
From the outside, a black hole star would appear as a huge agglomeration of hydrogen gas.
从外部看，黑洞星看起来像是一个巨大的氢气团。
If our sun were replaced with a black hole star, it would extend a dozen times farther than the orbit of Pluto.
如果我们的太阳被一颗黑洞星取代，它的延伸范围将比冥王星轨道远十几倍。
Out toward the edge, the star would boil unstably, sloughing off outer layers and explosively ejecting mass.
朝着边缘，恒星会不稳定地沸腾，脱落外层并爆炸性地喷射出质量。
“It’s going to be a very messy system where stuff is being blown out and falling back in,” de Graaff said.
德格拉夫说：“这将是一个非常混乱的系统，东西被吹出去又掉回来。”
“I wouldn’t want to come too close.”
“我不想靠得太近。”
Deep in the center, invisible to the outside world, the star would be powered by a black hole.
这颗恒星位于中心深处，外界看不见，由黑洞提供动力。
This black hole would pull gas around it, dramatically heating it and pushing light and energy outward, which would keep the outer layers of hydrogen from collapsing inward.
这个黑洞会吸引周围的气体，极大地加热它，并将光和能量向外推，这将防止氢的外层向内塌陷。
In this way, the black hole would form the “engine” of the star, analogous to the fusion-powered core of our sun.
这样，黑洞将形成恒星的“引擎”，类似于太阳的聚变核心。
Moving outward, material swirling around the black hole would beam out a range of colors that would slowly make their way toward the surface.
向外移动时，围绕黑洞旋转的物质会发出一系列颜色，并慢慢向表面移动。
And as with certain stars, the hydrogen near the surface would stop the bluer light while letting the redder light pass through.
与某些恒星一样，表面附近的氢会阻止蓝光，同时让红光通过。
The end result would be a gassy surface shining as brightly as a more exposed black hole but with the Balmer break and smooth red hump of a 5,000-kelvin star, de Graaff and Naidu theorized.
德格拉夫和奈杜推测，最终结果将是一个像更暴露的黑洞一样明亮的气体表面，但具有巴尔默断裂和 5,000 开尔文恒星的光滑红色驼峰。
As a bonus, the gas “cocoon” would also block X-rays, and the gas wouldn’t flicker much — which would explain two mysteries surrounding other little red dots.
作为奖励，气体“茧”还能阻挡 X 射线，而且气体不会闪烁太多——这可以解释围绕其他小红点的两个谜团。
But what about the broad lines, supposedly caused by hydrogen swirling fast around a black hole?
但是那些据称是由围绕黑洞快速旋转的氢引起的宽线又如何呢？
Another group provided a possible explanation.
另一组提供了可能的解释。
In all the millions of [observations] we’ve taken with ground-based telescopes, there’s nothing that looks like these sources.
在我们用地面望远镜进行的数百万次[观察]中，没有任何东西看起来像这些来源。
Anna de Graaff, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
安娜·德·格拉夫，马克斯·普朗克天文学研究所
The group, which included Vadim Rusakov , an astronomer at the University of Manchester, had been scrutinizing the broad lines of the best-observed little red dots.
该小组包括曼彻斯特大学天文学家瓦迪姆·鲁萨科夫(Vadim Rusakov)，他们一直在仔细观察观察最清楚的小红点的宽线。
Broad lines take the shape of a sharp mountain peak.
宽阔的线条呈现出尖锐的山峰形状。
But Rusakov and collaborators noticed that in many cases, these mountains sloped slightly more gently than would be expected if they came from fast-moving gas around a black hole.
但鲁萨科夫和合作者注意到，在许多情况下，如果这些山脉来自黑洞周围快速移动的气体，那么它们的倾斜度比预期的要稍微平缓一些。
So they suggested that instead of coming from rotating gas, much of the spread of the hydrogen colors could come from light scattering off electrons.
因此，他们认为氢颜色的传播大部分可能来自电子的光散射，而不是来自旋转的气体。
They digitally removed the effect of this electron-induced smudging from their data, Rusakov said.
鲁萨科夫说，他们以数字方式消除了数据中电子引起的污迹的影响。
After that, the broad lines stopped looking quite so broad and started looking more like light passing through a sluggishly churning shell of hydrogen gas in a particular state, similar to what you’d expect to see from a black hole star.
之后，这些宽线不再看起来那么宽，开始看起来更像是光穿过处于特定状态的缓慢搅拌的氢气壳，类似于你期望从黑洞恒星看到的东西。
The three teams — de Graaff’s, Naidu’s, and Rusakov’s — posted their findings on March 20, 2025 — “black hole star date,” as some of the researchers called it.
德格拉夫、奈杜和鲁萨科夫这三个团队于 2025 年 3 月 20 日发布了他们的发现——一些研究人员称之为“黑洞恒星日期”。
Black hole stars could represent a new stage in the development of a supermassive black hole: First, a black hole would form in the center of a shell of hydrogen, together with a baby galaxy of normal stars around it.
黑洞恒星可能代表超大质量黑洞发展的新阶段：首先，黑洞将在氢壳的中心形成，周围还有一个由正常恒星组成的婴儿星系。
Then, over time, the black hole would eat its way out of its cocoon, gaining mass as it cleared the hydrogen gas away.
然后，随着时间的推移，黑洞会从茧中蚕食出来，在清除氢气的同时获得质量。
“We are seeing the seed,” Naidu said.
“我们正在看到种子，”奈杜说。
“This is the birth of potentially every massive black hole in the universe.”
“这可能是宇宙中每个巨大黑洞的诞生。”
The black hole star enthusiasts appeal to Occam’s razor, arguing that their theory gives the simplest accounting of these two little red dots, and perhaps of little red dots in general.
黑洞星爱好者诉诸奥卡姆剃刀，认为他们的理论给出了对这两个小红点，甚至是一般小红点的最简单的解释。
But simple is subjective, and astronomers have spent the last year in a lively debate about what’s really going on.
但简单是主观的，天文学家在过去的一年里对到底发生了什么进行了激烈的辩论。
Even years after the discovery of the first little red dot, not much about them is settled.
即使在第一个小红点被发现多年之后，关于它们的问题仍然没有得到解决。
Dale Kocevski , an astrophysicist at Colby College, recalls leading a discussion about them at an April 2026 conference in Aspen, Colorado.
科尔比学院的天体物理学家戴尔·科切夫斯基 (Dale Kocevski) 回忆起 2026 年 4 月在科罗拉多州阿斯彭举行的一次会议上主持的关于它们的讨论。
He started by recapping what he hoped would be an uncontroversial idea about their trace amounts of blue light.
他首先回顾了他希望关于微量蓝光的一个没有争议的想法。
“The group erupted into argument, and we couldn’t even get past the first bullet point,” he said.
“大家爆发了争论，我们甚至无法通过第一个要点，”他说。
Many astronomers still argue that little red dots are traditional black holes — even the new duo.
许多天文学家仍然认为小红点是传统的黑洞——甚至是新的黑洞。
“The data is really compelling,” said Roberto Maiolino of the University of Cambridge.
“这些数据确实令人信服，”剑桥大学的罗伯托·麦奥利诺 (Roberto Maiolino) 说。
“I’m a little bit more dubious about the interpretation.”
“我对这个解释有点怀疑。”
For each point in favor of black hole stars, Maiolino fires off a quick rebuttal.
对于黑洞恒星的每一个观点，麦奥利诺都会快速反驳。
The lack of flicker?
缺乏闪烁？
In the early universe, black holes may have had a steadier food supply and may therefore have been tidier eaters.
在早期宇宙中，黑洞可能拥有更稳定的食物供应，因此可能是更整洁的食客。
The lack of X-rays?
缺乏X光检查？
Standard galactic black holes are ringed by a thick doughnut of gas and dust, which can block most X-rays.
标准的银河黑洞周围环绕着厚厚的气体和尘埃圈，可以阻挡大多数 X 射线。
He sees no reason to suspect the little red dots of being anything other than standard supermassive black holes.
他认为没有理由怀疑这些小红点不是标准的超大质量黑洞。
Roberto Maiolino, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, argues that textbook models of standard black holes — no star required — can explain observations both old and new.
剑桥大学天文学家罗伯托·麦奥利诺 (Roberto Maiolino) 认为，标准黑洞的教科书模型（不需要恒星）可以解释新旧观测结果。
The redness of the new objects is striking, he said, and he agrees that it means there must be a ton of gas between the black hole and us.
他说，新物体的红色令人震惊，他同意这意味着黑洞和我们之间一定存在大量气体。
But that gas could come in the form of the doughnut, or as puffy clouds that fill in patches of the black hole’s sky, as opposed to the shell of gas around a black hole star.
但这种气体可能以甜甜圈的形式出现，或者以蓬松的云的形式填充在黑洞的天空中，而不是黑洞恒星周围的气体壳。
Maiolino agrees that electron scattering likely contributes to broadening the lines in the spectra of some of the little red dots.
马伊利诺同意，电子散射可能有助于拓宽一些小红点的光谱线。
But electron scattering also smears hydrogen lines from supermassive black holes, he said.
但他说，电子散射也会模糊来自超大质量黑洞的氢谱线。
Maiolino and his collaborator, Piero Madau of the University of California, Santa Cruz, argue that the redness of the dots comes mainly from the angle at which we see them.
Maiolino 和他的合作者、加州大学圣克鲁斯分校的 Piero Madau 认为，这些点的红色主要来自于我们观察它们的角度。
The reddest dots are those that we happen to see edge on, their gassy doughnuts blocking our view.
最红的点是那些我们碰巧看到边缘的点，它们的气体甜甜圈挡住了我们的视线。
Webb also sees some “little blue dots.” These could be the same exposed black holes, viewed top-down, Maiolino and Madau pointed out in spring 2026 .
韦伯还看到了一些“小蓝点”。 Maiolino 和 Madau 在 2026 年春季指出，从自上而下的角度来看，这些可能是相同的暴露黑洞。
They also appeal to Occam’s razor — in this case arguing that black holes are a simpler explanation for little dots of all colors.
他们还诉诸奥卡姆剃刀——在这种情况下，他们认为黑洞是对所有颜色的小点的更简单的解释。
At this stage either theory — black hole or black hole star — could match what Webb telescope has seen.
在现阶段，无论是黑洞还是黑洞星理论，都可以与韦伯望远镜所看到的相匹配。
“I don’t think that there is a compelling reason to prefer one or the other,” said Mauro Giavalisco , an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst who has spent much of his career interpreting the spectra of distant galaxies.
马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校的天文学家毛罗·贾瓦利斯科 (Mauro Giavalisco) 表示：“我认为没有令人信服的理由选择其中之一。”他的职业生涯大部分时间都在解释遥远星系的光谱。
To test their interpretations, astronomers need a clearer picture of how black hole stars might form and how exactly they expect them to look.
为了检验他们的解释，天文学家需要更清楚地了解黑洞恒星可能如何形成以及他们期望它们的外观如何。
Over the last few years, Mitchell Begelman has been teaching a graduate student seminar on little red dots at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
在过去的几年里，米切尔·贝格曼（Mitchell Begelman）一直在科罗拉多大学博尔德分校教授关于小红点的研究生研讨会。
It’s kept him reading the firehose of papers coming out on the subject.
这让他不断阅读有关该主题的大量论文。
In these mysterious objects that weren’t quite stars and weren’t quite black holes, he recognized a ghost from his past: the quasi-star.
在这些既不完全是恒星也不完全是黑洞的神秘物体中，他认出了他过去的幽灵：准恒星。
“Suddenly the switch flipped, and I realized that this is what quasi-stars should look like,” Begelman said.
“突然间，开关翻转了，我意识到这就是准明星应该有的样子，”贝格曼说。
The field has gotten very polarized.
这个领域已经变得非常两极分化。
Anna-Christina Eilers, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
安娜-克里斯蒂娜·艾勒斯，麻省理工学院
Begelman had proposed the existence of quasi-stars back in 2006 , along with Marta Volonteri and Martin Rees, to explain observations of what looked like impossibly massive black holes.
早在 2006 年，贝格曼就与玛尔塔·沃隆泰里和马丁·里斯一起提出了准恒星的存在，以解释对看起来不可思议的巨大黑洞的观测结果。
Their quasi-star theory offers one way to make a black hole star: The core of a vast gas cloud collapses to directly form a black hole, gathering the remainder of the cloud around it.
他们的准恒星理论提供了一种制造黑洞恒星的方法：巨大的气体云的核心塌陷，直接形成黑洞，将剩余的气体云聚集在其周围。
In 2025, Begelman and his collaborator Jason Dexter applied the quasi-star model to the little red dots.
2025 年，Begelman 和他的合作者 Jason Dexter 将准星模型应用于小红点。
They estimated that quasi-stars could quickly assemble themselves in a few million years before settling into a more mature form that would look just like little red dots.
他们估计，准恒星可以在几百万年之内迅速组装起来，然后形成一种看起来像小红点的更成熟的形式。
They would do this for tens of millions of years — lasting long enough for Webb to spot them.
它们会这样做数千万年——持续的时间足以让韦伯发现它们。
In 2026, Giavalisco worked with a team to flesh out the quasi-star model as an origin for black hole stars, which he finds to be a natural way of explaining how little red dots could mask the signs of a feeding black hole.
2026 年，Giavalisco 与一个团队合作，充实了准恒星模型作为黑洞恒星的起源，他发现这是解释小红点如何掩盖黑洞吞噬迹象的自然方式。
He points out that our sun performs the same trick, hiding its explosive fusion, just on a much smaller scale.
他指出，我们的太阳也发挥着同样的作用，隐藏了它的爆炸性聚变，只是规模要小得多。
“We have billions and billions of hydrogen bombs exploding every second, and yet we see none of them,” he said.
“我们每秒都有数十亿枚氢弹爆炸，但我们却看不到它们，”他说。
Giavalisco and his collaborators found that their new model of a quasi-star fit the spectra of de Graaf’s and Naidu’s objects even better than the initial models had.
贾瓦利斯科和他的合作者发现，他们的新准恒星模型比最初的模型更符合德格拉夫和奈杜天体的光谱。
He thinks the quasi-star theory is a plausible explanation for the little red dots but remains open to other ideas.
他认为准星理论是对小红点的合理解释，但仍对其他想法持开放态度。
“I just want to know the truth,” he said.
“我只是想知道真相，”他说。
In the meantime, researchers are starting to search for another distinguishing pattern: If little red dots are black hole stars formed in the early universe, then they should grow rarer over time as they each break free from their shells and reveal their inner black holes.
与此同时，研究人员开始寻找另一种显着模式：如果小红点是早期宇宙中形成的黑洞恒星，那么随着时间的推移，它们应该会变得越来越稀有，因为它们都挣脱了外壳，露出了内部的黑洞。
In an August 2026 census of both red and blue dots broken up into different eras, Kocevski of Colby College and his collaborators found exactly that pattern .
在 2026 年 8 月对不同时代的红点和蓝点进行的人口普查中，科尔比学院的科切夫斯基和他的合作者准确地发现了这种模式。
In the data, as the universe approaches 2 billion to 3 billion years of age, the little red dots seem to vanish — preliminary evidence that little red dots, as black hole stars, might really be a puberty-like phase for many supermassive black holes.
在数据中，随着宇宙年龄接近20亿至30亿年，小红点似乎消失了——初步证据表明，小红点作为黑洞恒星，可能确实是许多超大质量黑洞的青春期阶段。
Theorists are already working out what that puberty-like phase might be like.
理论家已经在研究类似青春期的阶段可能是什么样子。
In another analysis , posted on September 8, Naidu, de Graaff, Eilers, and their collaborators tested out an assortment of techniques for deducing the mass of a black hole “seed” inside a black hole star.
在 9 月 8 日发布的另一篇分析中，奈杜、德格拉夫、艾勒斯和他们的合作者测试了各种技术来推断黑洞恒星内部黑洞“种子”的质量。
These hidden black holes seemed to be far less massive than standard, exposed black holes.
这些隐藏的黑洞似乎比标准的暴露黑洞质量要小得多。
The scientists propose that Webb is catching supermassive black hole stars — up to 1 million times the mass of the sun — in the act of incubating the universe’s first big black holes.
科学家们提出，韦伯正在捕捉超大质量黑洞恒星——质量高达太阳的 100 万倍——正在孕育宇宙中第一个大黑洞。
Some researchers, including Kocevski, still aren’t sure.
包括科切夫斯基在内的一些研究人员仍然不确定。
Kocevski suspects that the universe is a messy place, and that some little red dots are truly as starlike as the black hole star camp is arguing.
科切夫斯基怀疑宇宙是一个混乱的地方，一些小红点确实像黑洞恒星阵营所争论的那样像恒星。
Others, he thinks, will be more like standard black holes, as the other camp argues.
他认为，其他黑洞将更像标准黑洞，正如另一个阵营所认为的那样。
“I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re both right,” he said.
“我隐隐怀疑我们都是对的，”他说。
Get highlights of the most important news delivered to your email inbox
获取发送到您的电子邮件收件箱的最重要新闻的摘要
Quanta Magazine moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation.
《Quanta》杂志对评论进行审核，以促进知情、实质性、文明的对话。
Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected.
辱骂、亵渎、自我推销、误导、语无伦次或偏离主题的评论将被拒绝。
Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (New York time) and can only accept comments written in English.
版主在正常工作时间（纽约时间）有工作人员，并且只能接受英文评论。