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Related papers: Tests for Standard Accretion Disk Models by Variab…

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Accretion disks in AGN should be subject to the same type of instability as in cataclysmic variables (CVs) or in low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), which leads to dwarf nova and soft X-ray transient outbursts. It has been suggested that this…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2009-11-13 Jean-Marie Hameury , Maxime Viallet , Jean-Pierre Lasota

Under the unified model for active galactic nuclei (AGNs), narrow-line (Type 2) AGNs are, in fact, broad-line (Type 1) AGNs but each with a heavily obscured accretion disk. We would therefore expect the optical continuum emission from Type…

One of the most important features in active galactic nuclei (AGN) is the variability of their emission. Variability has been discovered at X-ray, UV, and radio frequencies on time scales from hours to years. Among the AGN family and…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-15 L. Hernández-García , O. González-Martín , I. Márquez , J. Masegosa

The All Sky Monitor (ASM) onboard the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has continuously monitored a number of Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with similar sampling rates for 14 years from 1996 January to 2009 December. Utilizing the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-05-20 You-Hong Zhang

Accretion disks around stellar-mass black holes offer unique opportunities to study the fundamental physics of standard thin disks, super-Eddington disks, and structure that may be connected to flux variability. These local analogues of…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2019-03-12 J. M. Miller , D. Barret , E. Cackett , M. Diaz Trigo , C. Done , E. Gallo , J. Kaastra , C. Motch , C. Pinto , G. Ponti , N. Webb , A. Zoghbi

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are believed to be powered by accretion of matter onto a supermassive black hole. A fundamental ingredient in shaping our understanding of AGN is their variability across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-09-08 Maurizio Paolillo , Iossif Papadakis

Warped accretion discs in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) exert a torque on the black hole that tends to align the rotation axis with the angular momentum of the outer disc. We compute the magnitude of this torque by solving numerically for…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 Priyamvada Natarajan , Philip J. Armitage

Variable continuum emission from AGN can be used to probe the structure of their accretion disks via reverberation mapping. Assuming a variable, hot inner light source irradiates the surrounding accretion disk, time delays between different…

Inconsistent conclusions are obtained from recent active galactic nuclei (AGNs) accretion disk inter-band time-lag measurements. While some works show that the measured time lags are significantly larger (by a factor of $\sim 3$) than the…

In this study, we demonstrate some of the caveats in common statistical methods used for analysing astronomical variability timescales. We consider these issues specifically in the context of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and use a more…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-12-12 Sofia Kankkunen , Merja Tornikoski , Talvikki Hovatta

The variability of submillimeter emission provides a useful tool to probe the accretion physics in low-luminosity active galactic nuclei. We accumulate four years of observations using Submillimeter Array for Centaurus A, NGC 4374, NGC…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-07-12 Bo-Yan Chen , Geoffrey C. Bower , Jason Dexter , Sera Markoff , Anthony Ridenour , Mark A. Gurwell , Ramprasad Rao , Sofia H. J. Wallström

We present results of recurrence analysis of 46 active galactic nuclei (AGN) using light curves from the 157-month catalog of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) in the 14-150 keV band. We generate recurrence plots and compute recurrence…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2022-11-28 R. A. Phillipson , M. S. Vogeley , P. T. Boyd

Both long and short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are expected to occur in the dense environments of active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disks. As these bursts propagate through the disks they live in, they photoionize the medium causing…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-03-29 Michael Ray , Davide Lazzati , Rosalba Perna

We test the consistency of active galactic nuclei (AGN) optical flux variability with the $\textit{damped random walk}$ (DRW) model. Our sample consists of 20 multi-quarter $\textit{Kepler}$ AGN light curves including both Type 1 and 2…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-07-03 Vishal P. Kasliwal , Michael S. Vogeley , Gordon T. Richards

We introduce a new model for understanding AGN continuum variability. We start from a Shakura--Sunyaev thin accretion disc with a steady-state radial temperature profile $T(R)$ and assume that the variable flux is due to axisymmetric…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-05-19 J. M. M. Neustadt , C. S. Kochanek

The new multi-wavelength monitoring campaign on NGC 5548 shows clearly that the variability of the UV/optical lightcurves lags by progressively longer times at longer wavelengths, as expected from reprocessing of an optically thick disk,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-10-11 Emma Gardner , Chris Done

Many AGN exhibit a highly variable luminosity. Some AGN also show a pronounced time delay between variations seen in their optical continuum and in their emission lines. In effect, the emission lines are light echoes of the continuum. This…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 W. F. Welsh

Context. Variability is a ubiquitous feature of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and the characterisation of the variability is crucial to constrain its physical mechanism and proper applications in AGN studies. The advent of all-sky and…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-06-04 Heechan Yuk , Xinyu Dai

This work develops application techniques for stochastic modelling of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) variability as a probe of accretion disk physics. Stochastic models, specifically Continuous Auto-Regressive Moving Average (CARMA) models,…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2019-09-06 Jackeline Moreno , Michael S. Vogeley , Gordon T. Richards