The Way We Tally Becomes the Tale: the Impact of Selection Strategies on the Inferred Evolution of Little Red Dots Across Cosmic Time

Pierluigi Rinaldi, Kevin Hainline, Francesco D'Eugenio, Pablo G. Pérez-González, Daniel J. Eisenstein, Christopher N. A. Willmer, Courtney Carreira, Brant Robertson, Benjamin D. Johnson, Stacey Alberts, William M. Baker, Andrew J. Bunker, Stefano Carniani, Eiichi Egami, Jakob M. Helton, Zhiyuan Ji, Ignas Juodžbalis, Xiaojing Lin, Jianwei Lyu, Zheng Ma, Roberto Maiolino, Eleonora Parlanti, Jan Scholtz, Yang Sun, Sandro Tacchella, Giacomo Venturi, Christina C. Williams, Chris Willott, Joris Witstok, Zihao Wu

First listed 2026-04-08 | Last updated 2026-04-12

Abstract

Little Red Dots (LRDs) have emerged as a key population linked to early black hole growth, yet photometric selections have predominantly targeted only the most extreme red systems, thereby shaping our current understanding of this new population of objects. In this work, we deliberately explore a broad range of optical redness while enforcing stringent compactness and visual inspection to ensure robustness and minimize contamination. Leveraging the depth and multiwavelength coverage of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) data in the GOODS-North and GOODS-South fields, we construct the largest photometric census of LRDs to date in these fields, comprising 412 sources over $z\approx2\text{--}11$ across $\approx349.6$ arcmin$^2$. We show that classic extreme color cuts isolate only a minor fraction of this population ($\lesssim25\%$), while the majority of LRDs span a broader, largely unexplored parameter space. We quantify how selection strategies impact UV and optical luminosity functions and number density evolution, finding that current demographic trends of LRDs are strongly driven by selection biases and further limited by incomplete identification at both high and low redshift. Spectroscopically confirmed LRDs reveal a continuous range of spectral shapes, consistent with varying Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) and host contributions in agreement with recent findings. Our results demonstrate that commonly adopted, purity-driven selections bias current demographic constraints toward the most extreme systems, potentially misrepresenting the diversity and evolution of the LRD population. Accounting for these selection effects is essential for interpreting LRDs and their role in early black hole growth.

Short digest

This paper asks how much our current picture of little red dots depends on the exact photometric selection strategy used to define the sample. The main result is that classic extreme-redness cuts recover only a minority of the broader compact LRD population, and that inferred luminosity functions and number-density evolution change substantially once a wider but still robust selection is used. The paper matters because it argues that part of the current LRD story is being written by selection bias rather than only by astrophysics, which is crucial for interpreting demographic trends and the connection to early black-hole growth.

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