Vasily Kokorev (University of Texas at Austin)

Ghost in the Cocoon: Unmasking the Dense Gas Shell Around a Little Red Dot

Little Red Dots have quickly become one of the most debated discoveries of the JWST era, showing unexpectedly strong breaks and absorption features that hint at buried AGN growing inside extremely dense gas. In this talk, I will present the deepest JWST/NIRSpec spectrum obtained for any LRD to date of a particularly striking example, GLIMPSE-17775, magnified by the AS1063 cluster.

This spectrum uncovers an unusually rich set of emission and absorption features: broad exponential permitted lines, strong helium transitions with hints of outflowing gas, and a dense forest of low-ionization iron lines. Together, these signatures reveal an AGN embedded in a dense, partially ionized cocoon, where scattering, fluorescence, and outflows reshape the emerging light — a “ghost” filtered through its own shell.

I will show how multiple independent diagnostics, from line-wing shapes to fluorescent metal features and P-Cygni-like helium profiles, converge on this dense-gas interpretation. The emerging picture is that at least some LRDs host rapidly growing black holes wrapped in thick gas envelopes, naturally explaining their red continua and unusual spectral signatures.

These observations provide the deepest look yet behind the gas curtain, offering a rare view of how Little Red Dots may grow inside their cocooned early-Universe environments.

Biography: Vasily Kokorev is a Cosmic Frontier Center Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies galaxy evolution and black hole growth in the early Universe, with a particular focus on the physics of the enigmatic Little Red Dots and on uncovering the earliest galaxies using JWST observations of strongly lensed fields. He works extensively with JWST spectroscopy to probe faint and extreme populations that are otherwise inaccessible.

Aafaque Raza Khan (University of Arizona)

Talk title and abstract coming soon.

Biography: Aafaque is a Doctoral candidate in Astrophysics from the University of Arizona, where he is also concurrently pursuing his Master's degree in Optical Sciences. He is also a NASA Future Investigator on the NASA FINESST grant. His doctoral research focuses on advancing and developing imaging and spectroscopy instruments and detector technologies for space missions and Stratospheric Balloon-borne suborbital observatories. As an astrophysicist, he is interested in understanding the evolution of galaxies through cosmic time by studying the CircumGalactic Medium (CGM). (Adapted from https://www.linkedin.com/in/aafaquerk)