韦布望远镜拍到的小红点：是黑洞，还是黑洞星？

In 2022, a telescope began taking pictures.

In the pictures it sent back, there were hundreds of little red dots.

These red dots are very far from us; light takes 13.4 billion years to travel from them.

So what we see is the universe from a very long time ago.

At first, astronomers thought they were galaxies.

Galaxies have many stars packed together and look very bright.

But growing that many stars takes a long time.

The universe back then was too young; there wasn't enough time.

Astronomer Kocevski was also looking at these red dots.

In the light from the red dots, he found a pattern.

This pattern shows that inside the red dots there is a very dense cloud of gas.

This gas is moving very fast.

For gas to move that fast, there must be something very heavy inside.

This heavy thing must also be squeezed into a very small space.

Astronomers call this kind of heavy, small thing a black hole.

So he thinks the red dots are very ordinary black holes.

These black holes are eating the things around them.

When things fall in, the gas glows red, and the light also turns red.

But such black holes should give off very strong X-rays.

X-rays are a kind of light we cannot see.

Yet the red dots have almost no X-rays.

He says the things fall in too fast, so X-rays cannot get out.

Another astronomer, Naidu, says that's not right.

He says the red dots are another kind of thing, called 'black-hole stars'.

A black-hole star is a black hole wrapped in a very thick cloud of gas.

The outer layer of gas glows red, like the surface of a star.

He says we have to admit that this is a completely new kind of thing.

Both explanations have points that don't add up.

Some say the black-hole star idea cannot explain the few red dots that leak light.

Others say the black hole explanation relies on many 'ifs'.

Later, a team measured the weight of one red dot.

It is tens of millions of times heavier than our Sun.

For the black hole explanation, this is good news.

But astronomer Green says this method of measurement is wrong.

She says this method only works for very clear objects.

Two stars orbiting each other can be measured this way.

A messy cloud of gas cannot.

The team that did the measurement also said they only measured one red dot.

She said, 'People only see what they want to see.'

He said he had never seen an argument like this.