The QUEST-La Silla AGN Variability Survey

TL;DR

The QUEST-La Silla AGN Variability Survey provides well-sampled optical light curves of extragalactic fields, characterizing AGN variability and identifying obscured or low-luminosity AGN through structure function analysis.

Contribution

This study introduces a new optical variability survey with high-cadence photometry in the XMM-COSMOS field, including correction methods for detector non-linearity and initial variability characterization of AGN.

Findings

Most BL AGN have A > 0.1 and γ > 0.025 in the structure function.

Variable NL AGN and GAL sources likely represent obscured or low-luminosity AGN.

Survey achieves 75-80% completeness at r~20 magnitude.

Abstract

We present the characterization and initial results from the QUEST-La Silla AGN variability survey. This is an effort to obtain well sampled optical light curves in extragalactic fields with unique multi-wavelength observations. We present photometry obtained from 2010 to 2012 in the XMM-COSMOS field, which was observed over 150 nights using the QUEST camera on the ESO-Schmidt telescope. The survey uses a broadband filter, the $Q$-band, similar to the union of the $g$ and the $r$ filters, achieving an intrinsic photometric dispersion of $0.05$ mag, and a systematic error of $0.05$ mag in the zero-point. Since some detectors of the camera show significant non-linearity, we use a linear correlation to fit the zero-points as a function of the instrumental magnitudes, thus obtaining a good correction to the non-linear behavior of these detectors. We obtain good photometry to an equivalent limiting magnitude of $r\sim 20.5$. Studying the optical variability of X-ray detected sources in the XMM-COSMOS field, we find that the survey is $\sim75-80$% complete to magnitudes $r\sim20$, and $\sim67$% complete to a magnitude $r\sim21$. The determination and parameterization of the structure function (${SF}_{norm}(\tau) = A \tau^{\gamma}$) of the variable sources shows that most BL AGN are characterized by $A > 0.1$ and $\gamma > 0.025$. It is further shown that variable NL AGN and GAL sources occupying the same parameter space in $A$ and $\gamma$ are very likely to correspond to obscured or low luminosity AGN. Our samples are, however, small, and we expect to revisit these results using larger samples with longer light curves obtained as part of our ongoing survey.