The idea of stable, localized bundles of energy has strong appeal as a model for particles. In the 1950s, John Wheeler envisioned such bundles as smooth configurations of electromagnetic energy that he called geons, but none were found. Instead, particle-like solutions were found in the late 1960s with the addition of a scalar field, and these were given the name boson stars. Since then, boson stars find use in a wide variety of models as sources of dark matter, as black hole mimickers, in simple models of binary systems, and as a tool in finding black holes in higher dimensions with only a single Killing vector. We discuss important varieties of boson stars, their dynamic properties, and some of their uses, concentrating on recent efforts.

稳定、局部能量束的想法作为粒子模型具有很强的吸引力。在 1950 年代，约翰·惠勒 （John Wheeler） 设想了这种束作为电磁能的平滑配置，他称之为地牢 ，但没有发现。相反，在 1960 年代后期发现了添加标量场的粒子状溶液，这些溶液被命名为玻色子星 。从那时起，玻色子星在各种模型中被用作暗物质源、黑洞模拟器、双星系统的简单模型，以及作为仅使用单个杀伤向量寻找更高维度黑洞的工具。我们讨论玻色子星的重要品种、它们的动态特性以及它们的一些用途，重点关注最近的努力。