Pith Number

pith:K2S4WRGJ

pith:2026:K2S4WRGJ7NU53F2RUJH5AT5HVC

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

On the quenching of LRD X-ray emission by both Compton-thick gas and high accretion rates

Albert Sneppen, Darach Watson, James H. Matthews, Stuart A. Sim

Little Red Dots stay X-ray dark only with both Compton-thick gas and weak intrinsic emission like high-accretion narrow-line AGN.

arxiv:2605.15263 v1 · 2026-05-14 · astro-ph.GA · astro-ph.HE

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{K2S4WRGJ7NU53F2RUJH5AT5HVC}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

We find that the X-ray constraints are very tight, requiring both extinction by a Compton-thick gas column N_H∼10^{25} cm^{-2} with moderate metallicity (0.05-0.1 Z_⊙) and intrinsically weak X-ray emission (bolometric to X-ray luminosity ratio, k_bol,X≳30) as observed in high accretion rate, narrow-line AGN, to make LRDs sufficiently faint to evade detection.

C2weakest assumption

The gas properties and column densities previously derived from optical and near-infrared spectra using the Sirocco radiative transfer code accurately represent the actual physical conditions around the central black holes.

C3one line summary

LRDs require Compton-thick gas at moderate metallicity plus high accretion rates producing weak X-rays to explain their non-detection, implying they are not chemically pristine.

References

300 extracted · 300 resolved · 70 Pith anchors

[1] archivePrefix = "arXiv", eprint = · doi:10.1146/annurev-astro-082812-141003

[2] arXiv e-prints , keywords =

[3] arXiv e-prints , keywords = · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2601.22214

[4] , year = 2022, month = may, volume = 2022 · doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04659-4

[5] Little red dots as young supermassive black holes in dense ionized cocoons. , keywords =. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09900-4 , archivePrefix =. 2503.16595 , primaryClass = · doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09900-4

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:00:49.342267Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

56a5cb44c9fb69dd9751a24fd04fa7a8b5b4832caf9789110d4101f8dad66bd1

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.15263 · arxiv_version: 2605.15263v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.15263 · pith_short_12: K2S4WRGJ7NU5 · pith_short_16: K2S4WRGJ7NU53F2R · pith_short_8: K2S4WRGJ

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/K2S4WRGJ7NU53F2RUJH5AT5HVC \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 56a5cb44c9fb69dd9751a24fd04fa7a8b5b4832caf9789110d4101f8dad66bd1

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "48eda30d290c90f2f5ac5076ff427460ddbec727fbfd871e53755451eefd62d4",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.HE"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.GA",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-14T18:00:00Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "43073f49bb12088a86dd60506edd6c515adcbdba8aa0d224ee7b38955adae94c"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.15263",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}