Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter AGN

Wednesday, 20 September 2017, 14:30   (HS4)

Variability timescales of QSOs from the Tautenburg long-term monitoring program

H. Meusinger¹, C. Pohl¹, P. Rauer^2
1 Thüringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany
² University Utrecht, Netherlands

The Tautenburg QSO long-term monitoring program provides optical B band lightcurves for about 300 QSOs in two Schmidt fields over more than five decades (observer frame). This is the longest time span available so far for a statistical investigation of the variability of a flux-limited (B \le 20) QSO sample. We derived characteristic variability timescales from two different approaches, structure function analysis and damped random walk model. For both methods extensive simulations were performed for evaluating the results. We found longer mean timescales than derived previously from the multi-epoch data in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82, which cover about one decade. A small fraction of the QSO sample shows long-term trends over the whole time interval covered by our observations.