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The study of quasar light curves poses two problems: inference of the power spectrum and interpolation of an irregularly sampled time series. A baseline approach to these tasks is to interpolate a time series with a Damped Random Walk (DRW)…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-11-21 Egor Danilov , Aleksandra Ćiprijanović , Brian Nord

Disk continuum reverberation mapping is one of the primary ways we learn about active galactic nuclei (AGN) accretion disks. Reverberation mapping assumes that time-varying X-rays incident on the accretion disk drive variability in…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2025-01-14 Amy Secunda , Yan-Fei Jiang , Jenny E. Greene

We present damped harmonic oscillator (DHO) light-curve modeling for a sample of 12,714 spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82 region. DHO is a second-order continuous-time autoregressive…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-09-14 Weixiang Yu , Gordon T. Richards , Michael S. Vogeley , Jackeline Moreno , Matthew J. Graham

Machine learning is a promising tool to reconstruct time-series phenomena, such as variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN), from sparsely-sampled data. Here we use three Continuous Auto-Regressive Moving Average (CARMA) representations…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2022-04-21 Xinyue Sheng , Nicholas Ross , Matt Nicholl

We conduct an analysis of over 60,000 dwarf galaxies (7<=log(M_*/M_\odot)<=10) in search of photometric variability indicative of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Using data from the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE), a time domain survey on…

We study the long-term ($\approx$30 years) radio variability of 43 radio bright AGNs by exploiting the data base of the University of Michigan Radio Astronomy Observatory (UMRAO) monitoring program. We model the periodograms (temporal power…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-01-18 Jongho Park , Sascha Trippe

The sampling strategy of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) make TESS light curves extremely valuable to investigate high cadence optical variability of AGN. However, because the TESS instrument was primarily designed for…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2023-10-16 Krista Lynne Smith , Lia Sartori

A long-term variability study spanning a range of black hole mass systems, from microquasars hosting stellar-mass black holes to active galactic nuclei (AGNs) harboring supermassive black holes, provides new insights into the physics of…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-20 Yongyun Chen , Qiusheng Gu , Junhui Fan , Dingrong Xiong , Xiaoling Yu , Xiaogu Zhong , Xiaotong Guo

The advent of new time domain surveys and the imminent increase in astronomical data expose the shortcomings in traditional time series analysis (such as power spectra analysis) in characterising the abundantly varied, complex and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-07-22 R. A. Phillipson , P. T. Boyd , A. P. Smale , M. S. Vogeley

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 present a comprehensive study of five nearby active galaxies featuring large (tens of kpc) extended emission-line regions (EELRs). The study is based on large-format integral field spectroscopic observations conducted with the Multi Unit…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-11-05 C. Finlez , E. Treister , F. Bauer , M. Koss , W. Keel , W. Maksym , L. Sartori , G. Venturi , C. Ricci , N. Nagar , C. Riesco , Y. Díaz , M. Parra

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-10-11 Hengxiao Guo , Junxian Wang , Zhengyi Cai , Mouyuan Sun

The characteristic timescale ($\tau$) of continuum variability of the accretion disk in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is known to be related to the thermal timescale, which is predicted to scale with AGN luminosity ($L$) and restframe…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-03-26 Suyeon Son , Minjin Kim , Luis C. Ho

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…

Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL AGNs) show large changes in luminosity and optical spectral state on time-scales of a few years, and provide a valuable probe of time-dependent accretion in the disc-BLR-torus system. We present a…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-03-19 Yu Tao , Jie Tang , Xuan Wei

In this study, we demonstrate some of the caveats in common statistical methods used for analysing astronomical variability timescales. We consider these issues specifically in the context of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and use a more…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-12-12 Sofia Kankkunen , Merja Tornikoski , Talvikki Hovatta

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) have been observed to vary stochastically with 10-20 rms amplitudes over a range of optical wavelengths where the emission arises in an accretion disk. Since the accretion disk is unlikely to vary coherently,…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2011-01-04 Jason Dexter , Eric Agol

It has been found that some quasars are undergoing quasi-periodic variations (most of them with damped amplitudes) in optical bands from long-term monitoring campaigns, but how to explain the origin of such light curve variations still…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-12-25 Yue-Chang Peng , Jian-Min Wang , Pu Du , Shuo Zhai , Yan-Rong Li

The UV/optical variability of active galactic nuclei and quasars is useful for understanding the physics of the accretion disk and is gradually attributed to the stochastic fluctuations over the accretion disk. Quasars generally appear…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-07-18 Zhen-Yi Cai , Jun-Xian Wang , Wei-Min Gu , Yu-Han Sun , Mao-Chun Wu , Xing-Xing Huang , Xiao-Yang Chen

Active galactic nuclei (AGN) light curves observed with different wavebands show that the variability in longer wavelength bands lags the variability in shorter wavelength bands. Measuring these lags, or reverberation mapping, is used to…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2023-11-21 Amy Secunda , Yan-Fei Jiang , Jenny E. Greene