Little Red Dots at an Inflection Point: Ubiquitous "V-Shaped" Turnover Consistently Occurs at the Balmer Limit

2024/11/05 by Setton, David J., Greene, Jenny E., de Graaff, Anna +18 · 17 citations
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.03424

Abstract

Among the most puzzling early discoveries of JWST are "Little Red Dots" -- compact red sources that host broad Balmer emission lines and, in many cases, exhibit a "V shaped" change in slope in the rest-optical. The physical properties of Little Red Dots currently have order-of-magnitude uncertainties, because models to explain the continuum of these sources differ immensely. Here, we leverage the complete selection of red sources in the RUBIES program, supplemented with public PRISM spectra, to study the origin of this "V shape". By fitting a broken power law with a flexible inflection point, we find that a large fraction (20/44, nearly all spatially unresolved) of extremely red Hα emitters at 2

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