Little Red Dots or Brown Dwarfs? NIRSpec Discovery of Three Distant Brown Dwarfs Masquerading as NIRCam-selected Highly Reddened Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

Cold, substellar objects such as brown dwarfs have long been recognized as contaminants in color-selected samples of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). In particular, their near- to mid-infrared colors (1–5 μm) can closely resemble the V-shaped ( f _λ ) spectra of highly reddened accreting supermassive black holes (“little red dots”), especially at 6 < z < 7. Recently, a NIRCam-selected sample of little red dots over 45 arcmin ² has been followed up with deep NIRSpec multiobject prism spectroscopy through the UNCOVER program. By investigating the acquired spectra, we identify 3 of the 14 followed-up objects as T/Y dwarfs with temperatures between 650 and 1300 K and distances between 0.8 and 4.8 kpc. At ${4.8}_{-0.1}^{+0.6}$ kpc, A2744-BD1 is the most distant brown dwarf discovered to date. We identify the remaining 11 objects as extragalactic sources at z _spec ≳ 5. Given that three of these sources are strongly lensed images of the same AGN (A2744-QSO1), we derive a brown dwarf contamination fraction of 25% in this NIRCam selection of little red dots. We find that in the near-infrared filters, brown dwarfs appear much bluer than the highly reddened AGN, providing an avenue for distinguishing the two and compiling cleaner samples of photometrically selected highly reddened AGN.