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C., Bechtold, J., & Siemiginowska, A

16 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 752 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.

16 Pith papers citing it
752 external citations · Crossref
abstract

We analyze a sample of optical light curves for 100 quasars, 70 of which have black hole mass estimates. Our sample is the largest and broadest used yet for modeling quasar variability. The sources in our sample have z < 2.8 and 10^6 < M_BH < 10^10. We model the light curves as a continuous time stochastic process, providing a natural means of estimating the characteristic time scale and amplitude of quasar variations. We employ a Bayesian approach to estimate the characteristic time scale and amplitude of flux variations; our approach is not affected by biases introduced from discrete sampling effects. We find that the characteristic time scales strongly correlate with black hole mass and luminosity, and are consistent with disk orbital or thermal time scales. In addition, the amplitude of short time scale variations is significantly anti-correlated with black hole mass and luminosity. We interpret the optical flux fluctuations as resulting from thermal fluctuations that are driven by an underlying stochastic process, such as a turbulent magnetic field. In addition, the intranight variations in optical flux implied by our empirical model are < 0.02 mag, consistent with current microvariability observations of radio-quiet quasars. Our stochastic model is therefore able to unify both long and short time scale optical variations in radio-quiet quasars as resulting from the same underlying process, while radio-loud quasars have an additional variability component that operates on time scales < 1 day.

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2026 15 2025 1

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representative citing papers

Accretion of Primordial Black Holes in Stellar Interiors

astro-ph.HE · 2026-06-01 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Self-consistent spherical accretion simulations show cooling-enhanced growth of PBHs with radiative efficiency ~10^{-2} in the bremsstrahlung regime, yielding a critical seed mass of ~10^{-16} M_sun to consume a solar-mass star in a Hubble time.

Stochastic Variability of Binary Accretion

astro-ph.HE · 2026-06-26 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Simulations show the accretion rate PSD in a q=0.2 SMBH binary is a broken power-law with white noise to -4 slope transition at ~5 times orbital frequency due to damped random walk gas delivery and minidisk filtering.

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