Extreme AGNs and Transients: When Black Holes Misbehave

Session

LRDs

4 Aug 2025, 10:30

The University of Hong Kong

4. Little Red Dots: Laboratory for Black Hole and Galaxy Formation

Prof. Luis Ho (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Peking University)

04/08/2025, 10:30

The discovery of the "little red dots" with the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a host of surprises about this mysterious class of high-redshift objects. Their physical nature remains hotly contested. I will argue that little red dots trace the initial phase of supermassive black holes that predates the formation of their host galaxies. As such, they offer a uniquely valuable...

9. Double Disk Model for Little Red Dots: an Intrinsic Luminous Infrared Model

Mr Chenxuan Zhang

04/08/2025, 13:50

One of the most mysterious results from observations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the detection of numerous, high-redshift, very red, extremely compact, broad-line sources termed ``little red dots'' (LRDs). It is unclear whether the LRDs belong to an active galactic nucleus (AGN) or simply a collection of very compact star clusters. We build spectral energy distributions (SEDs)...

10. The Host Galaxy And Complex UV Morphology of the Little Red Dots

Mr Chang-Hao Chen (The Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University)

04/08/2025, 14:25

We investigate the morphology from UV to optical of eight little red dots (LRDs) selected from the JWST UNCOVER survey, applying a new technique (GalfitS) to simultaneously fit the morphology and spectra energy distribution using multiband NIRCam images covering ~ 1-4 ${\mu m}$. For the majority of LRDs (7/8) in our sample, the morphology in all bands are dominated by an unresolved point...