Image Details
Caption: Figure 7.
Left: radial profile of the stacked image of 99 photometrically selected LRDs from P. Rinaldi et al. (2025a) in the rest-frame UV (1500–2000 Å). Right: same as on the left, but with the background artificially elevated to the highest level that does not cause the surrounding region to become strongly negative. To emphasize the extended nature of the stacked UV profile of the LRDs, we note that our simulated stacked PSF was constructed using a spatial offset of 1 pixel (≈30 mas for the NIRCam short-wavelength channel), which is significantly larger (≈6×) than the typical internal astrometric scatter in the JADES images, thus representing an upper limit on the observed stacked PSF size. Altogether, this experiment reveals that the radial profile of the stacked LRDs declines less steeply than expected, suggesting that an extended structure may lie hidden beneath the observational noise.
© 2026. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.