Lonely Little Red Dots: Challenges to the AGN-nature of little red dots through their clustering and spectral energy distributions

Understand

Observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal a previously unseen population of compact red objects, known as ``little red dots`` (LRDs).

• We study a new photometrically selected sample of 124 LRDs in the redshift range $z$ $\sim$ 3 - 10 selected from NIRCam coverage of the CEERS, NEP-TDF, JADES and JEMS surveys.
• For JADES, the NEP-TDF and CEERS, we compare SED models with and without AGN components and analyse the impact of an AGN component on the goodness of fit using the Bayesian information criterion (BIC).
• We find that whilst the $\chi^{2}$ of the majority of models containing AGN components is improved compared to models without AGN components, we show that the BIC suggests models without AGN are a more appropriate fit to LRD SEDs, especially when MIRI data is available.