Related papers: A Sample Bias in Quasar Variability Studies
Only galaxies bright enough and large enough to be unambiguously identified and measured are included in galaxy surveys used to estimate cosmic shear. We demonstrate that because gravitational lensing can scatter galaxies across the…
Variations in scaling behavior in the flux and emissions of gravitational lensed quasars can provide valuable information about the dynamics within the sources and their cosmological evolution with time. Here, we study the multifractal…
A number of deep, wide-field, near-infrared surveys employing new infrared cameras on 4m-class telescopes are about to commence. These surveys have the potential to determine the fraction of luminous dust-obscured quasars that may have…
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…
We analyze the X-ray variability of 264 Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic quasars using the Chandra public archive. This data set consists of quasars with spectroscopic redshifts out to z~5 and covers rest-frame time scales up to Delta…
Cosmological observables rely heavily on summary statistics such as two-point correlation functions. In many practical cases (e.g. the weak-lensing cosmic shear), those correlation functions are estimated from a finite, discrete sample of…
We estimate the bias on weak lensing mass measurements of shear-selected galaxy cluster samples. The mass bias is expected to be significant because constructions of cluster samples from peaks in weak lensing mass maps and measurements of…
Microlensing perturbations to the magnification of gravitationally lensed quasar images are dependent on the angular size of the quasar. If quasar variability at visible wavelengths is caused by a change in the area of the accretion disk,…
The development of new fluorescent molecules and dyes requires precise determination of their emission efficiency, which ultimately defines the potential of the developed materials. For this, the photoluminescence quantum yield (QY) is…
We show that current clustering observations of quasars and luminous AGN can be explained by a merger model augmented by feedback from outflows. Using numerical simulations large enough to study clustering out to 25 comoving h^{-1} Mpc, we…
We present an analysis of X-ray variability in a flux limited sample of QSOs. Selected from our deep ROSAT survey, these QSOs span a wide range in redshift ($0.1<z<3.2$) and are typically very faint, so we have developed a method to…
We characterize the optical variability of quasars in the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) and Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) surveys. We re-calibrate the $r$-band light curves for $\sim$28,000 luminous, broad-line AGNs from…
The potential of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for wide-field variability studies is illustrated using multi-epoch observations for 3,000,000 point sources observed in 700 deg2 of sky, with time spans ranging from 3 hours to 3 years. These…
A fundamental prediction of relativistic cosmologies is that, due to the expansion of space, observations of the distant cosmos should be time dilated and appear to run slower than events in the local universe. Whilst observations of…
Significant clustering around the rarest luminous quasars is a feature predicted by dark matter theory combined with number density matching arguments. However, this expectation is not reflected by observations of quasars residing in a…
Microlensing perturbations to the flux ratios of gravitationally lensed quasar images can vary with wavelength because of the chromatic dependence of the accretion disk's apparent size. Multiwavelength observations of microlensed quasars…
The SDSS-IV/eBOSS has an extensive quasar program that combines several selection methods. Among these, the photometric variability technique provides highly uniform samples, unaffected by the redshift bias of traditional optical-color…
We conduct a pilot investigation to determine the optimal combination of color and variability information to identify quasars in current and future multi-epoch optical surveys. We use a Bayesian quasar selection algorithm (Richards et al.…
We have investigated the spatial distribution of quasars and its relationship with redshift by using the two-point correlation function, the variance of cell counts and the conditional density as a function of redshift. By comparing our…
Recent studies of luminous infrared-selected active galactic nuclei (AGN) suggest that the reddest, most obscured objects display a higher angular clustering amplitude, and thus reside in higher-mass dark matter halos. This is a direct…