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Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) have long been observed to "twinkle" (i.e., their brightness varies with time) on timescales from days to years in the UV/optical bands. Such AGN UV/optical variability is essential for probing the physics of…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2020-03-24 Mouyuan Sun , Yongquan Xue , W. N. Brandt , Wei-Min Gu , Jonathan R. Trump , Zhenyi Cai , Zhicheng He , Da-bin Lin , Tong Liu , Junxian Wang

Variability of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) has long been servicing as an essential avenue of exploring the accretion physics of black hole (BH). There are two commonly used methods for analyzing AGN variability. First, the AGN…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-07-04 Zhen-Bo Su , Zhen-Yi Cai , Mouyuan Sun , Hengxiao Guo , Wei-Min Gu , Jun-Xian Wang

A long-standing question is whether active galactic nuclei (AGN) vary like Galactic black hole systems when appropriately scaled up by mass (refs 1-3). If so, we can then determine how AGN should behave on cosmological timescales by…

Astrophysics · Physics 2011-05-05 I M McHardy , E Koerding , C Knigge , P Uttley , R P Fender

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

Context: Variations in the mass accretion rate appear to be responsible for the rapid transitions in spectral type that are observed in increasingly more active galactic nuclei (AGNs). These objects are now labeled "changing-look" AGNs and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-04-15 F. Marin , D. Hutsemékers

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

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 UV/optical light curves of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are commonly described by the Damped Random Walk (DRW) model. However, the physical interpretation of the damping timescale, a key parameter in the DRW model, remains unclear.…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-03-05 Shuying Zhou , Mouyuan Sun , Zhen-Yi Cai , Guowei Ren , Jun-Xian Wang , Yongquan Xue

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

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

Over the last 12 years, AGN monitoring by RXTE, has revolutionised our understanding of the X-ray variability of AGN, of the relationship between AGN and Galactic black hole X-ray binaries (BHBs) and hence of the accretion process itself,…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2014-11-20 I. M. McHardy

We have used Kepler photometry to characterize variability in four radio-loud active galactic nuclei (three quasars and one object tentatively identified as a Seyfert 1.5 galaxy) on timescales from minutes to months, comparable to the light…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-06-15 Ann E. Wehrle , Paul J. Wiita , Stephen C. Unwin , Paolo Di Lorenzo , Mitchell Revalski , Daniel Silano , Dan Sprague

We present the latest results of a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, "New Numerical Galaxy Catalogue", which is combined with large cosmological N-body simulations. This model can reproduce statistical properties of galaxies at z <…

We present soft X-ray variability time-scales for 65 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) derived from ROSAT/PSPC pointing data. For these 65 objects with obvious exponential increasing or decreasing patterns in their light curves, we use the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-07 W. Bian , Y. Zhao

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

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) exhibit variability in their luminosities with timescales that correlate with the mass of the black hole at the centre of the AGN. Presently, the empirical correlation lacks sufficient precision to confidently…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-12-22 Adrien Hélias , Sarah C. Gallagher , Pauline Barmby

We investigate the effect of active galactic nucleus (AGN) variability on the observed connection between star formation and black hole accretion in extragalactic surveys. Recent studies have reported relatively weak correlations between…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-16 Ryan C. Hickox , James R. Mullaney , David M. Alexander , Chien-Ting J. Chen , Francesca M. Civano , Andy D. Goulding , Kevin N. Hainline

Here we investigate the connection of broad emission line shapes and continuum light curve variability time scales of type-1 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). We developed a new model to describe optical broad emission lines as an accretion…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-05-21 E. Bon , P. Jovanovic , P. Marziani , N. Bon , A. Otasevic

This paper sets out to measure the timescale of quasar variability with a view to new understanding of the size of accretion discs in active galactic nuclei. Previous attempts to measure such timescales have been based on sparsely sampled…

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

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
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