JWST discovered AGN: from overmassive black holes, to little red dots - Ignas Juodžbalis
When: Friday, October 24, 2025, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Where: G. O. Jones, Room 610, Mile End
Speaker: Ignas Juodžbalis (Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge)
Title: JWST discovered AGN - from overmassive black holes, to little red dots
Abstract:
The first years of JWST revealed that low luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGN) are quite ubiquitous in the early Universe. However, they seem to display many peculiarities relative to their more luminous counterparts. In particular, the black holes (BH) they contain seem to make up large (>10%) fractions of the host's stellar masses, most of these AGN also lack X-ray emission. A fraction of them also belong to a newly discovered class of enigmatic red objects, dubbed Little Red Dots (LRDs), which display unusual Balmer-break like features in their UV-optical spectra which may be tracing dense gas surrounding their BHs rather than stars. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the current state of AGN observations with JWST, exploring the peculiarities and demographics of these sources and how the next generation of surveys could help shed light on them.