天文学家可能已经发现了一个黑洞，它与我们之前看到的任何黑洞都不同

It almost seems like astronomers are in a race to unveil the biggest black holes they can find. Most recently, a team of German astronomers claimed to have discovered a black hole 40 billion times the mass of the Sun.

天文学家们似乎在竞相揭开他们所能发现的最大黑洞的面纱。最近，一组德国天文学家声称发现了一个质量是太阳400亿倍的黑洞。

But what if there are also black holes many magnitudes smaller?

但是，如果还有比它小许多倍的黑洞呢?

In a study published today in the prestigious journal Science, a team of astronomers from Ohio State University claim to have discovered an object that belongs to a previously missing class of black holes.

在今天发表在著名杂志《科学》上的一项研究中，来自俄亥俄州立大学的一组天文学家声称，他们发现了一个以前失踪的黑洞。

"We're showing this hint that there is another population out there that we have yet to really probe in the search for black holes," lead author Todd Thompson said in a statement.

研究报告的主要撰写人托德·汤普森在一份声明中说:“我们的研究表明，在寻找黑洞的过程中，还有另外一个种群有待我们去探索。”

If confirmed, current theories would have to take into account a new class of black hole - forcing us to rethink how we understand the way stars and other kinds of celestial objects are born and die.

如果得到证实，目前的理论将不得不考虑一个新的黑洞类别——这将迫使我们重新思考我们如何理解恒星和其他天体的诞生和死亡。

Thompson and his team were puzzled by the huge gap between the size of the biggest neutron stars - extremely dense and relatively small stars that form after larger stars implode after a supernova - and the smallest black holes we know of.

汤普森和他的团队对最大的中子星和我们所知的最小的黑洞之间的巨大差距感到困惑。

Neutron stars are fairly small - two to three times the mass of the Sun - but stars any larger than that tend to collapse in on themselves and form black holes.

中子星是相当小的——质量是太阳的2到3倍——但是任何比它大的恒星都容易坍缩形成黑洞。

Their smoking gun: a giant red star that was orbiting something that at first appeared to be too small to be a black hole in the Milky Way, but was much bigger than the neutron stars we know of.

他们确凿的证据是:一颗巨大的红星围绕着一个物体运行，这个物体起初看起来太小，不像是银河系中的黑洞，但比我们所知的中子星大得多。

Their finding really did turn out to be a low-mass black hole, and it was only 3.3 times the mass of the Sun - usually the black holes we've found in the past are at least five times the Sun's mass or much, much larger.

他们的发现确实是一个低质量黑洞，只有太阳质量的3.3倍——通常我们过去发现的黑洞至少是太阳质量的5倍，或者更大。

The discovery could redefine the way we look at the life cycle of a star.

这一发现可能会重新定义我们看待恒星生命周期的方式。

"If we could reveal a new population of black holes, it would tell us more about which stars explode, which don't, which form black holes, which form neutron stars," said Thompson. "It opens up a new area of study."

“如果我们能发现一个新的黑洞种群，它将告诉我们更多关于哪些恒星会爆炸，哪些不会，哪些会形成黑洞，哪些会形成中子星，”汤普森说。“它开辟了一个新的研究领域。”