The relation between quasars' optical spectra and variability

TL;DR

This study explores the relationship between quasar optical variability and spectral features, revealing that quasars oscillate between bright and dim states along the Eigenvector 1 plane, indicating potential repeatability of significant brightness changes.

Contribution

It demonstrates how quasar brightness variations are linked to their spectral features on the EV1 plane and introduces a new understanding of their oscillatory behavior over time.

Findings

Brightness changes are related to EV1 position.

Changing-Look quasars occupy opposite sides of EV1.

Quasars tend to oscillate between activity states.

Abstract

This work aimed to find the relationship between quasars' optical variability and spectral features to reveal the regularity behind the random variation. It is known that quasar's FeII/Hbeta flux ratio and equivalent width of [OIII]5007 are negatively correlated, called Eigenvector 1. In this work, we visualized the relationship between the position on this Eigenvector 1 (EV1) plane and how they had changed their brightness after ~10 years. We conducted three analyses using different quasar samples each. The first analysis showed the relation between their distributions on the EV1 plane and how much they had changed brightness, using 13,438 Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasars. This result shows how brightness changes later are clearly related to the position on the EV1 plane. In the second analysis, we plotted the sources reported as Changing-Look(State) Quasars on the EV1 plane. This result shows that the position on the EV1 plane corresponds activity level of each source, the bright or dim state of them are distributed on the opposite sides divided by the typical quasar distribution. In the third analysis, we examined the transition vectors on the EV1 plane using sources with multiple-epoch spectra. This result shows that the brightening and dimming sources move on the similar path and they turn into the position corresponding to the opposite activity level. We also found this trend is opposite to the empirical rule that RFeII positively correlated with the Eddington ratio, which has been proposed based on the trends of a large number of quasars. From all these analyses, it is indicated that quasars tend to oscillate between both sides of the distribution ridge on the EV1 plane; each of them corresponds to a dim state and a bright state. This trend in optical variation suggests that significant brightness changes, such as Changing-Look quasars, are expected to repeat.