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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 2.

Spectroscopic sample of LRDs by redshift and Balmer break strength. We plot the redshift and Balmer break strength of PAN-BH*-1, and the JWST sample from A. de Graaff et al. (2025b) (purple diamonds), and three local LRDs in X. Lin et al. (2026), for comparison. We also highlight three sources with a particularly strong Balmer break: The Cliff (A. de Graaff et al. 2025a), MoM-BH* (R. P. Naidu et al. 2025), and CAPERS-LRDz9 (A. J. Taylor et al. 2025). The Balmer break strength of the JWST spectroscopic sample is computed as fν,4000–4100/fν,3620–3720, whereas the value for PAN-BH*-1 is directly obtained from the F115W/F814W photometry.

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