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Related papers: Line and Continuum Variability in Active Galaxies

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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

Emission-line galaxies (ELGs) are crucial in understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies, while little is known about their variability. Here we report the study on the optical variability of a sample of ELGs selected in the…

In deep X-ray surveys, active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with a broad range of luminosities have been identified. However, cosmologically distant low-luminosity AGN (LLAGN, $L_{\mathrm{X}} \lesssim 10^{42}$ erg s$^{-1}$) identification still…

The spectral variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is one of their key features that enables us to study in more details the structure of AGN emitting regions. Especially, the broad line profiles, that vary both in flux and shape,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-01-20 D. Ilic , L. C. Popovic , A. I. Shapovalova , A. N. Burenkov , V. H. Chavushyan , A. Kovacevic

We search a sample of 9,361,613 isolated sources with 13<g<14.5 mag for slowly varying sources. We select sources with brightness changes larger than ~ 0.03 mag/year over 10 years, removing false positives due to, for example, nearby bright…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2025-01-27 Sydney Petz , Christopher S. Kochanek

We present our statistical analysis of the connection between active galactic nuclei (AGN) variability and physical properties of the central supermassive black hole (SMBH). We constructed optical light curves using data from the QUEST-La…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-09-19 P. Sánchez-Sáez , P. Lira , J. Mejía-Restrepo , L. C. Ho , P. Arévalo , M. Kim , R. Cartier , P. Coppi

Number of monitoring observations of continuum emission from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) have been made in optical--X-ray bands. The results obtained so far show (i) random up and down on timescales longer than decades, (ii) no typical…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 T. Kawaguchi , S. Mineshige

We examine the continuum variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) by analyzing the multi-epoch spectroscopic data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. To achieve this, we utilized approximately 2 million spectroscopy pairwise combinations…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-11-13 Minjin Kim , Suyeon Son , Luis C. Ho

The variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN) has long held the promise of shedding light on their detailed structure, and possibly other astrophysical phenonema. Different emission mechanisms lead to different patterns of variability in…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-07 M. R. S. Hawkins

We study the optical variability characteristics of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) from the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) AGN catalogue by utilising approximately five years of optical light curves from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-08-12 Vivek Kumar Jha , Debbijoy Bhattacharya , Hum Chand

We present the light curves obtained during an eight-year program of optical spectroscopic monitoring of nine Seyfert 1 galaxies: 3C 120, Akn 120, Mrk 79, Mrk 110, Mrk 335, Mrk 509, Mrk 590, Mrk 704, and Mrk 817. All objects show…

In the standard AGN reverberation-mapping model, variations in broad-line region (BLR) fluxes are predicted from optical continuum variability (taken as a proxy for the ionizing continuum) convolved with a response function that depends on…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-12-14 C. Martin Gaskell , Kayla Bartel , Julia N. Deffner , Iris Xia

Changing-look (CL) Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs), characterized by appearance/disappearance of broad emission lines in the span of a few years, present a challenge for the AGN unified model, whereby the Type 1 vs. Type 2 dichotomy results…

Here we present the long-term optical spectral monitoring of a changing-look active galactic nuclei (AGN) NGC 3516 that covers 22 years (from 1996 to 2018). We explore a variability in the broad lines and continuum, finding that the…

The cosmological evolution of X-ray-selected and optically selected Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) show different behaviours interpreted in terms of two different populations. The difference is evident mainly for low luminosity AGNs…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 D. Trevese , V. Zitelli , F. Vagnetti , K. Boutsia , G. M. Stirpe

Variability is a property shared by virtually all active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and was adopted as a criterion for their selection using data from multi epoch surveys. Low Luminosity AGNs (LLAGNs) are contaminated by the light of their…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 D. Trevese , K. Boutsia , F. Vagnetti , E. Cappellaro , S. Puccetti

Results of a long-term monitoring ($\gtrsim 10$ years) of the broad line and continuum fluxes of three Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), 3C 390.3, NGC 4151, and NGC 5548, are presented. We analyze the H$\alpha$ and H$\beta$ profile variations…

We present the results from a study of ~9,600 Broad-Line selected AGN with host galaxies detected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 17 (SDSS DR17). We compute ensemble variability statistics based on the comparison of the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-05-24 Krittapas Chanchaiworawit , Vicki Sarajedini

Graham et al. found a sample of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and quasars from the Catalina Real-time Transient Survey (CRTS) that have long-term periodic variations in optical continuum, the nature of the periodicity remains uncertain. We…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-04-20 Kai-Xing Lu , Yan-Rong Li , Shao-Lan Bi , Jian-Min Wang

Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL-AGNs) exhibit dramatic spectral variability on unexpectedly short timescales, challenging standard accretion flow models. Despite growing samples, the physical drivers of this extreme variability,…