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A Black Hole Star at Cosmic Noon: Extreme Balmer Break, Photospheric Continuum, and Broad Absorption by Thick Winds in a Little Red Dot at z = 1.7

  • Authors: Alberto Torralba, Jorryt Matthee, Andrea Weibel, Rohan P. Naidu, Yilun Ma, Aidan P. Cloonan, Aayush Desai, Anna de Graaff, Jenny E. Greene, Christian Kragh Jespersen, Ivan G. Kramarenko, Sara Mascia, Pascal A. Oesch, Wendy Q. Sun, Christina C. Williams

Alberto Torralba et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1005 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 1.

SED of PAN-BH*-1 Top: cutouts from all the HST and JWST images in which PAN-BH*-1 is covered. It shows a remarkably compact morphology in all the wavelengths, resolved only in the HST F606W and F814W bands (Section 3.3). Bottom: photometry from JWST/NIRCam (blue squares), HST/ACS (purple pentagons), and Spitzer/IRAC+MIPS (red hexagons, and red triangle for the 5σ upper limit). The empty square is the F200W flux after subtracting the Hα flux measured from X-Shooter spectroscopy. We show the spectrum of The Cliff for comparison (gray line), shifted to z = 1.73 and normalized to the F150W flux of PAN-BH*-1. We also show the best-fitting blackbody spectrum (blue dashed line) and the best model from the synthetic LRD atmosphere models from H. Liu et al. (2026), shifted to z = 1.73 (green line), undersampled by a factor of 500 for clarity.

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