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Related papers: The AGN Optical Variability Fundamental Plane

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Understanding the origin and evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBH) stands as one of the most important challenges in astrophysics and cosmology, with little current theoretical consensus. Improved observational constraints on the…

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

Theory predicts that a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) could be observed as a luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN) that periodically varies on the order of its orbital timescale. In X-rays, periodic variations could be caused by…

Since their discovery, AGN light curves are known to be intrinsically variable. In the optical/UV band, this variability is consistent with correlated or red noise and is particularly well described by the damped random walk (DRW) model. In…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-02 Lorenzo Bertassi , Maria Charisi , Fabio Rigamonti , Stefano Covino , Massimo Dotti

Reverberation mapping (RM) has long been a powerful tool for measuring the masses of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), but the precision of these mass measurements depends on the so-called…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-07-08 Sen Yang , Pu Du , Jian-Min Wang

In the era of massive photometric surveys, we explore several approaches to estimate the masses of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) from optical ground-based imaging, in each case comparing to the independent…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-09-02 Sarah Casura , Dragana Ilić , Jonathan Targaczewski , Nemanja Rakić , Jochen Liske

A damped random walk (DRW) process is often used to describe the temporal UV/optical continuum variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN). However, recent investigations have shown that this model fails to capture the full spectrum of AGN…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-21 Weixiang Yu , Gordon T. Richards , John J. Ruan , Michael S. Vogeley , Franz E. Bauer , Matthew J. Graham

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

The long-term variability study over a range of black hole (BH) mass systems from the microquasars of stellar-mass black holes to the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) of supermassive black holes, in $\gamma$-rays offers new insights into the…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2024-10-10 Ajay Sharma , Raj Prince , Debanjan Bose

Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHB) are expected to produce periodic modulations in active galactic nuclei (AGN) light curves, but distinguishing such signals from stochastic red-noise variability remains a major challenge. We present…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-05-13 Pablo Huijse , Jordy Davelaar , Joris De Ridder , Nicholas Jannsen , Conny Aerts

We analyze the light curves of 413 radio sources at submillimeter wavelengths using data from the Submillimeter Array calibrator database. The database includes more than 20,000 observations at 1.3 and 0.8 mm that span 13 years. We model…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2015-09-23 Geoffrey C. Bower , Jason Dexter , Sera Markoff , Mark A. Gurwell , Ramprasad Rao , Ian McHardy

X-ray variability provides a powerful probe of the innermost regions of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), offering valuable insights into the accretion process and the structure of the corona. Previous studies have established a correlation…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-04-07 Ruisong Xia , Hao Liu , Yongquan Xue , Jialai Wang , Guowei Ren , Mouyuan Sun , Shifu Zhu , Mengqiu Huang , Qingwen Wu , Xian-Liang Lu , Zhen-Bo Su , Shuying Zhou

We investigate the connection between supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their host dark matter halos in the local universe using the clustering statistics and luminosity function of AGN from the Swift/BAT AGN Spectroscopic survey (BASS…

The origin of the optical flux variability in active galactic nuclei (AGN) is largely unknown. Previous studies have correlated features of the variability structure function (SF) with AGN properties, though they mostly involved…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-05-06 Ashley Hai Tung Tan , Christian Wolf , Neelesh Amrutha , Christopher A. Onken , John L. Tonry , Rachel Webster

We investigate the local supermassive black hole (SMBH) density function and relative mass accretion rates of all active galactic nuclei (AGNs) identified in a volume-limited sample of infrared (IR) bright galaxies (L_IR > 3 x 10^9 L_sun)…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-18 Andy D. Goulding , David M. Alexander , Bret D. Lehmer , James R. Mullaney

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

We report first results from a deep near infrared campaign with the Hubble Space Telescope to obtain late-epoch images of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), 10-15 years after the first epoch data were obtained. The main objectives are to…

We study the X-ray variability properties of distant AGNs in the Chandra Deep Field-South region over 17 years, up to $z\sim 4$, and compare them with those predicted by models based on local samples. We use the results of Monte Carlo…

[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

Recent X-ray variability studies suggest that the log of the square of the fractional rms variability amplitude, rms^2, seems to correlate with the log of the AGN black-hole mass, M_BH, with larger black holes being less variable for a…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 Martin E. Pessah