RUBIES: A Spectroscopic Census of Little Red Dots; All V-Shaped Point Sources Have Broad Lines

Understand

The physical nature of Little Red Dots (LRDs) - a population of compact, red galaxies revealed by JWST - remains unclear.

• Photometric samples are constructed from varying selection criteria with limited spectroscopic follow-up available to test intrinsic spectral shapes and prevalence of broad emission lines.
• We use the RUBIES survey, a large spectroscopic program with wide color-morphology coverage and homogeneous data quality, to systematically analyze the emission-line kinematics, spectral shapes, and morphologies of $\sim$1500 galaxies at $z > 3.1$.
• We identify broad Balmer lines via a novel fitting approach that simultaneously models NIRSpec/PRISM and G395M spectra, yielding 80 broad-line sources with 28 (35%) at $z > 6$.