A Little Red Dot at $\mathbf{z}=7.3$ within a Large Galaxy Overdensity

Abstract

The nature of "Little Red Dots" and their relation to other forms of accreting supermassive black holes remain an open question. Here we report the discovery of a Little Red Dot at $z=7.3$. It is attenuated by moderate amounts of dust, $A_V=2.79\text{mag}$, with an intrinsic bolometric luminosity of $10^{46.6}\text{erg}{\text{s}}^{-1}$ and a SMBH mass of $5\times 10^8{\text{M}}_{\odot }$. Most notably, this object is embedded in an overdensity of eight nearby galaxies, allowing us to calculate a spectroscopic estimate of the clustering of galaxies around Little Red Dots. We find a Little Red Dot-galaxy cross-correlation length of $r_0=8\pm 2{\text{h}}^{-1}\text{cMpc}$, comparable to that of $z\sim 6$ UV-luminous quasars. The resulting estimate of their minimum dark matter halo mass of ${\log }_{10}(M_{\text{halo, min}}/{\text{M}}_{\odot })=12.0_{-1.0}^{+0.8}$ indicates that nearly all halos above this mass must host actively accreting SMBHs at $z\approx 7$, in strong contrast with the far smaller duty cycle of luminous quasars ($<1\%$). Our results, taken at face value, motivate a picture in which SMBHs in Little Red Dot phases could serve as the obscured precursors of UV-luminous quasars, which provides a natural explanation for the short UV-luminous lifetimes inferred from both quasar clustering and quasar proximity zones.

The article is published in Nature Astronomy as Schindler, JT., Hennawi, J.F., Davies, F.B. et al. A little red dot at z = 7.3 within a large galaxy overdensity. Nat Astron (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02660-1