Speaker
Description
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) typically show variability on all time
scales which can range from days to years. The purpose of this work is
to study intra-year variability (i.e., months-timescale) of AGNs
through photometric monitoring in order to determine candidates for a
follow-up study for reverberation mapping techniques. Our sample of
AGNs are drawn from a well-defined quasar sample from the Hamburg/ESO
Survey or HES, which consists of 330 quasars with redshifts z < 0.3.
We have used the robotic Thai Southern Hemisphere Telescope at Cerro
Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to observe the targets in
optical broadband B, V and R filters. After standard image
calibration, we use a custom-written pipeline based on publicly
available software to produce light curves from our observation for
future analysis. We analyze the light curves to determine whether the
target quasar shows intra-year variability and compare our photometry
with the original HES data which was taken about 25 years ago to
further study decade-scale variability. Here, we present our current
results of our light-curve analysis and show some particularly notable
example, such as HE1309-2501 with significant variability over short
timescales.
