English

Composite spectrum of Little Red Dot from a standard inner disk and an unstable outer disk

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-01-15 v2

Abstract

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed a new class of high-redshift, very red, compact broad-line sources, termed as "little red dots" (LRDs). The physical mechanism driving these properties remains elusive. We construct spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with spectroscopic redshift for 28 LRDs and find they exhibit V-shaped SEDs with a common break frequency of νb1014.96±0.06\nu_{\rm b}\simeq10^{14.96\pm0.06} Hz. We propose that the unique SEDs can be well explained by the combination of an inner standard disk and an outer gravitationally unstable accretion disk with Toomre parameter Q1Q\sim1, where the outer disk has a temperature of 20004000K\sim2000-4000 K and mainly radiates in near-infrared to optical wavebands. The composite spectrum from this model naturally explains the V-shaped continuum and reproduces intrinsically luminous infrared-optical emission without requiring extreme dust extinction or unusual stellar populations. Even considering possible dense gas around the disk to account for pronounced Balmer breaks in some LRDs, the intrinsic optical-UV emission is only suppressed by factors of 23\lesssim2-3, which suggests that most LRDs are sub-Eddington and intrinsically weak. These results provide new insights into early-phase black hole growth and galaxy evolution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.12719,
  title  = {Composite spectrum of Little Red Dot from a standard inner disk and an unstable outer disk},
  author = {Chenxuan Zhang and Qingwen Wu and Xiao Fan and Luis C. Ho and Jiancheng Wu and Huanian Zhang and Bing Lyu and Xinwu Cao and Jianmin Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12719},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 8 figures; accepted for publication in Nature Astronomy