English
Related papers

Related papers: Testing tests on AGN microvariability

200 papers

Accreting supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies are the engine of active galactic nuclei (AGN). X-ray light curves of unabsorbed AGN show dramatic random variability on timescales ranging from seconds to years. The power…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-10-29 Mehdy Lefkir , Simon Vaughan , Mike Goad , Daniela Huppenkothen , Phil Uttley

Context. The classification of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is a challenge in astrophysics. Variability features extracted from light curves offer a promising avenue for distinguishing AGNs and their subclasses. This approach would be very…

Variability studies hold information on otherwise unresolvable regions in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Population studies of large samples likewise have been very productive for our understanding of AGN. These two themes are coming…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2016-05-31 Andy Lawrence

Context. Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL-AGNs) challenge the unified model of AGNs and offer key insights into the physics of the accretion processes of super-massive black holes. While systematic spectroscopic comparisons have…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-05-26 Litao Zhu , Zhongxiang Wang , Alok C. Gupta , P. U. Devanand , Ruoheng Yang , Qiangmeng Huang , Man Lang , Jiawen Li

Automatic classification methods applied to sky surveys have revolutionized the astronomical target selection process. Most surveys generate a vast amount of time series, or \quotes{lightcurves}, that represent the brightness variability of…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2018-01-31 Nicolas Castro , Pavlos Protopapas , Karim Pichara

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) sources feature supermassive black holes that launch relativistic plasma jets. They are key $\gamma$-ray sources providing a unique laboratory for studying extreme particle acceleration and plasma physics.…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-02-03 Luana Passos-Reis , Elisabete M. de Gouveia Dal Pino , Tarek Hassan , Santiago Pita , Alberto Domínguez

The results of recent AGN monitoring campaigns confirm the ``big picture'' of the echo paradigm, but the details of the emission-line light curves cannot be accurately reproduced with only the simplest assumptions, some of which must be…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Dan Maoz

The damped random walk (DRW) process is one of the most commonly used and simplest stochastic models to describe variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN). An AGN light curve can be converted to just two DRW model parameters - the signal…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-09-10 Szymon Kozłowski

Optical variability has proven to be an effective way of detecting AGNs in imaging surveys, lasting from weeks to years. In the present work we test its use as a tool to identify AGNs in the VST multi-epoch survey of the COSMOS field,…

Machine-learning (ML) algorithms will play a crucial role in studying the large datasets delivered by new facilities over the next decade and beyond. Here, we investigate the capabilities and limits of such methods in finding galaxies with…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2019-08-22 Andreas L. Faisst , Abhishek Prakash , Peter L. Capak , Bomee Lee

Variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) has long been servicing as an essential avenue of exploring the accretion physics of black hole (BH). There are two commonly used methods for analyzing AGN variability. First, the AGN…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-07-04 Zhen-Bo Su , Zhen-Yi Cai , Mouyuan Sun , Hengxiao Guo , Wei-Min Gu , Jun-Xian Wang

We present a test of the emission statistics of active galactic nuclei (AGN), probing the connection between red-noise temporal power spectra and multi-modal flux distributions known from observations. We simulate AGN lightcurves under the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-11 Jong-Ho Park , Sascha Trippe

Since the discovery of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and their subclasses, a unification scheme of AGN has been long sought. Orientation-based unified models predict that some of the diversity within AGN subclasses can be explained by the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-01-08 Suk Yee Yong , Rachel L. Webster , Anthea L. King , Nicholas F. Bate , Kathleen Labrie , Matthew J. O'Dowd

Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) variability can be used to study the physics of the region in the vicinity of the central black hole. In this paper, we investigated intra-night optical variability of AGN in the COSMOS field in order to…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-09-12 Joonho Kim , Marios Karouzos , Myungshin Im , Changsu Choi , Dohyeong Kim , Hyunsung D. Jun , Joon Hyeop Lee , Mar Mezcua

We present an analysis of the nuclear variability of $\sim28,000$ nearby ($z<0.15$) galaxies with Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopy in Stripe 82. We construct light curves using difference imaging of SDSS g-band images, which…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-12-12 Vivienne F. Baldassare , Marla Geha , Jenny Greene

The unification of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is a model that has been difficult to test due to the lack of knowledge on the intrinsic luminosities of the objects. We present a test were we probe the model by statistical investigation of…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2012-11-05 Beatriz Villarroel , Andreas Korn , Yoshiki Matsuoka

The nature of the obscuring material in active galactic nuclei (AGN) can be studied by measuring changes in the line-of-sight column density, $N_{\rm H,los}$, over time. This can be accomplished by monitoring AGN over long periods of time…

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are variable on a wide range of timescales, though relatively few systematic variability surveys have been conducted. Previous broad-band (both spectral and temporal) variability surveys of AGN are limited in…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Jonathan E. Grindlay

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

AGN exhibit rapid, high amplitude stochastic flux variations across the entire electromagnetic spectrum on timescales ranging from hours to years. The cause of this variability is poorly understood. We present a Green's Function-based…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-07-26 Vishal P. Kasliwal , Michael S. Vogeley , Gordon T. Richards