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、局部的能量束作为粒子模型的想法具有很强的吸引力。在 1950 年代，约翰·惠勒 （John Wheeler） 设想了这种束，即他称之为几何的电磁能的平滑配置，但没有找到。相反，在 1960 年代后期发现了类似粒子的解决方案，并增加了一个标量场，这些解被命名为玻色子星。从那时起，玻色子星在各种模型中被用作暗物质的来源、黑洞模拟者、双星系统的简单模型，以及作为仅使用单个 Killing 向量在更高维度中寻找黑洞的工具。我们讨论了玻色子星的重要品种、它们的动力学特性以及它们的一些用途，重点介绍了最近的努力。