Determine whether newly identified LRD candidates have broad H-alpha emission

Determine whether the five previously unreported Little Red Dot candidates with NIRSpec/Prism spectra exhibit broad H$\alpha$ components through follow-up high-resolution NIRSpec observations.

Background

A reverse-k-nearest-neighbor search seeded with 19 spectroscopically confirmed broad-line LRDs identifies 57 candidates that had not previously been reported. Eight of these candidates have publicly available NIRSpec/Prism spectra, but three are excluded because of incomplete spectral coverage.

The five remaining candidates show Hα\alpha emission lines and LRD-like red continua. Their classification as broad-line LRDs remains unresolved because the available spectra do not establish whether they contain broad Hα\alpha components; the authors identify higher-resolution NIRSpec observations as the required follow-up.

References

Follow-up high-resolution NIRSpec observations can determine whether they exhibit broad H$\alpha$ components.

— Learning JWST. I. A Foundation Model for New Population Discoveries and Morphology-Aware Photometric Redshift Measurements in the JADES Survey  (2609.11879 - Ding et al., 10 Sep 2026) in Section 4.3, subsection “From Blind Discovery to Candidate Retrieval”