Related papers: Quasar Selection Based on Photometric Variability

Wide-field photometric surveys enable searches of rare yet interesting objects, such as strongly lensed quasars or quasars with a bright host galaxy. Past searches for lensed quasars based on their optical and near infrared properties have…

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has obtained images in five broad-band colors for several hundred square degrees. We present color-color diagrams for stellar objects, and demonstrate that quasars are easily distinguished from stars by their…

We present a catalog of quasars selected from broad-band photometric ugri data of the Kilo-Degree Survey Data Release 3 (KiDS DR3). The QSOs are identified by the random forest (RF) supervised machine learning model, trained on SDSS DR14…

The stochastic photometric variability of quasars is known to follow a random-walk phenomenology on emission timescales of months to years. Some high-cadence restframe optical monitoring in the past has hinted at a suppression of…

The South Galactic Cap $u$-band Sky Survey (SCUSS) provides a deep $u$-band imaging of about 5000 deg$^2$ in south Galactic cap. It is about 1.5 mag deeper than the SDSS $u$-band. In this paper we evaluate the capability of quasar selection…

We have obtained single-epoch optical photometry for 201 quasars, taken from the FIRST Bright Quasar Survey, which span a wide range in radio loudness. Comparison with the magnitudes of these objects on the POSS-I plates provides by far the…

The WISE satellite has detected hundreds of millions sources over the entire sky. Classifying them reliably is however a challenging task due to degeneracies in WISE multicolour space and low levels of detection in its two…

Three-dimensional wide-field galaxy surveys are fundamental for cosmological studies. For higher redshifts (z > 1.0), where galaxies are too faint, quasars still trace the large-scale structure of the Universe. Since available telescope…

Quasars are bright and unobscured active galactic nuclei (AGN) thought to be powered by the accretion of matter around supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. The temporal variability of a quasar's brightness contains valuable…

We identify 885,503 type 1 quasar candidates to i<22 using the combination of optical and mid-IR photometry. Optical photometry is taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III: Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (SDSS-III/BOSS), while…

We present a method which uses colour-colour cuts on SDSS photometry to select white dwarfs with hydrogen rich (DA) atmospheres without the recourse to spectroscopy. This method results in a sample of DA white dwarfs that is 95% complete at…

Identifications of quasars at intermediate redshifts (2.2<z<3.5) are inefficient in most previous quasar surveys as their optical colors are similar to those of stars. The near-IR K-band excess technique has been suggested to overcome this…

High redshift quasars (HZQs) with redshifts of z >~ 6 are so rare that any photometrically-selected sample of sources with HZQ-like colours is likely to be dominated by Galactic stars and brown dwarfs scattered from the stellar locus. It is…

Studies have shown that UV/optical light curves of quasars can be described with the prevalent damped random walk (DRW, also known as Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process) model. A white noise power spectral density (PSD) is expected at low frequency…

Quasars have long been known as intrinsically variable sources, but the physical mechanism underlying the temporal optical/UV variability is still not well understood. We propose a novel nonparametric method for modeling and forecasting the…

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST is expected to discover tens of millions of new Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). The survey's exceptional cadence and sensitivity will enable UV/optical/NIR monitoring of a significant fraction of these…

We combine deep, wide-field near-IR and optical imaging to demonstrate a reddening-independent quasar selection technique based on identifying outliers in the (g-z) / (z-H) colour diagram. In three fields covering a total of ~0.7 deg^2 to a…

We introduce a probabilistic approach to select 6<z<8 quasar candidates for spectroscopic follow-up, which is based on density estimation in the high-dimensional space inhabited by the optical and near-infrared photometry. Density…

We present a method which uses cuts in colour-colour and reduced proper motion-colour space to select white dwarfs without the recourse to spectroscopy while allowing an adjustable compromise between completeness and efficiency. Rather than…

We investigate the use of optical photometric variability to select and identify blazars in large-scale time-domain surveys, in part to aid in the identification of blazar counterparts to the ~30% of gamma-ray sources in the Fermi 2FGL…