The paper: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024ApJ....

A nice article covering the excitement around LRDs: www.quantamagazine.org/the-beautifu...

Exactly two years ago -- the moment of submission of the "Little Red Dot" paper! @jorryt.bsky.social and I managed to find something red to wear for the occasion. Fueled by coffee/hot chocolate and photographed by Pascal Oesch!

Grateful that our recent paper was covered in the cosmic superstar amongst astronomy publications -- @astrobites.bsky.social! Thanks to Ansh Gupta for the thoughtful summary!

astrobites.org/2025/04/22/s...

That feeling of anticipation/excitement/x-mas morning hits at 110% every single time! The most sublime instrument fashioned by humankind, for these few hours, is working hard on our behest! @jwstfeed.bsky.social @jwstobserver.bsky.social

I'll end this thread with some purple prose that didn't quite make it into the final draft.

In the mean time, with the clean selection technique, we can already place strong constraints on the # density of such sources that our theorist friends can match their models against! These #s matter for e.g., LISA black hole merger rates and whether Roman might detect Pop III supernovae!

Of course, we need a spectrum to confirm this extraordinary hypothesis -- as we've learnt several times over the last couple years with JWST, the Universe is full of surprises! Whatever we find, it will bring us closer to the day we finally discover these sources.

For example, here we look at *all* the prism spectra in the public archive -- no galaxy has colors that resemble this Pop 3 candidate...

After scouring all the archival images, we found a *single* source that satisfied all our criteria. It is extremely difficult to explain this object's colors without appealing to an extremely metal-poor population (believe me, as this 41 page paper shows -- we tried very hard!).

We developed a new search method optimized for JWST that hones in on the characteristic signatures of these objects (very weak metal lines, extremely strong Hydrogen/Helium lines, hot temperatures).

With the amazing JWST, assisted by gravitational lensing, we are now able to push to the very faint limits needed to detect galaxies dominated by Pop III stars!

In many ways, these stars represent the beginning of our beginnings! These are the first sources that transmuted Hydrogen/Helium into the elements that would one day give rise to life on Earth!

Paper day! With @sfseiji.bsky.social and the GLIMPSE team we report a compelling candidate for a "Pop III" galaxy. Pop III being the first generation of stars that formed out of primordial Hydrogen and Helium left over after the Big Bang. arxiv.org/abs/2501.11678