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200 papers

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

Here we investigate light curves of the continuum and emission lines of five type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGN) from our monitoring campaign, to test time-evolution of their time delays.Using both modeled and observed AGN light curves we…

We systematically analyze X-ray variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the 7~Ms \textit{Chandra} Deep Field-South survey. On the longest timescale ($\approx~17$ years), we find only weak (if any) dependence of X-ray variability…

In this paper, standard accretion disk models of AGNs are tested using light curves of 26 objects well observed for reverberation mapping. Time scales of variations are estimated by the most common definition of the variability time scale…

Astrophysics · Physics 2014-01-10 H. T. Liu , J. M. Bai , X. H. Zhao , L. Ma

The characteristic timescale at which the variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) turns from red noise to white noise can probe the accretion physics around supermassive black holes (SMBHs). A number of works have studied the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-09-17 Guowei Ren , Shuying Zhou , Mouyuan Sun , Yongquan Xue

The variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is ubiquitous but has not yet been understood. Measuring the optical variation properties of AGNs, such as variation timescale and amplitude, and then correlating them with their fundamental…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-01-11 Xu-Fan Hu , Zhen-Yi Cai , Jun-Xian Wang

We present a numerical framework for the variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN), which links the variability of AGN over a broad range of timescales and luminosities to the observed properties of the AGN population as a whole, and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-10-09 Lia F. Sartori , Benny Trakhtenbrot , Kevin Schawinski , Neven Caplar , Ezequiel Treister , Ce Zhang

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

Aperiodic optical variability is a common property of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs), though its physical origin is still open to question. To study the origin of the optical -- ultraviolet variability in AGN, we compare light curves of two…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-30 T. Kawaguchi , S. Mineshige , M. Umemura , E. L. Turner

We compiled a sample of 73 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with reverberation mapping (RM) observations from RM campaigns including our ongoing campaign of monitoring super-Eddington accreting massive black holes (SEAMBHs). This sample covers…

The extremes of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) variability offer valuable new insights into the drivers and physics of AGN. We discuss some of the most extreme cases of AGN variability; the highest amplitudes, deep minima states, extreme…

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

Context: The damped random walk (DRW) stochastic process is nowadays frequently used to model aperiodic light curves of AGNs. A number of correlations between the DRW model parameters, the signal decorrelation timescale and amplitude, and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-01-18 Szymon Kozłowski

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) exhibit complex variability across multiple wavelengths, reflecting diverse physical processes near their central engines. This work investigates the temporal variability of four AGNs Mrk~509, NGC~5548,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-05-12 R. A. A. Souza , E. Hatziminaoglou , A. de Pádua Santos , T. Stosic

Motivated by upcoming photometric and spectroscopic surveys (Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), Manuakea Spectroscopic Explorer), we design the statistical proxies to measure the cadence effects on active…

The corona is an integral component of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) which can produce the X-ray emission. However, many of its physical properties and the mechanisms powering this emission remain a mystery. In this work, we study the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-07-08 Haiyun Zhang , Dahai Yan , Li Zhang , Niansheng Tang

[Abbreviated] We search for scaling relations between the fundamental AGN parameters and rest-frame UV/optical variability properties for a sample of $\sim$90 X-ray selected AGNs covering a wide redshift range from the XMM-COSMOS survey,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-01-13 T. Simm , M. Salvato , R. Saglia , G. Ponti , G. Lanzuisi , K. Nandra , R. Bender

Light-travel-time delays provide one of the most powerful ways of learning about the structure and kinematics of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Estimating delays from observations of AGN variability presents statistical challenges because…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-01-23 C. Martin Gaskell

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

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