Known changing-look AGN located within Rubin Deep Drilling Fields

TL;DR

This paper compiles a catalog of known changing-look AGN and identifies those within Rubin Observatory's survey fields, highlighting promising targets for future variability studies in the era of large time-domain surveys.

Contribution

It provides the first catalog linking known CL-AGN with Rubin survey regions, facilitating future variability research.

Findings

79 CL-AGN located in high-cadence Rubin survey regions

5 CL-AGN within Deep Drilling Fields (DDFs) as prime targets

Proof of concept for connecting CL-AGN with upcoming survey data

Abstract

Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL-AGN) exhibit spectroscopic and photometric changes on timescales of months to years, making them powerful laboratories for studying accretion variability onto supermassive black holes. Motivated by the growing relevance of large spectro-photometric time-domain surveys, especially the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), we compiled a master catalog of known CL-AGN from the literature and evaluated its spatial overlap with the Rubin survey footprint. Using a geometric cross-match based on sky coordinates, we identify 79 sources located in high-cadence regions of the main survey footprint (Wide-Fast-Deep, or WFD), including 5 particularly favorable targets lying within the Deep Drilling Fields (DDFs) of COSMOS and XMM-LSS. These sources represent especially promising candidates for future variability studies in the Rubin era. This Research Note presents a first proof of concept for connecting known CL-AGN with Rubin observing fields, while the full catalog and a more comprehensive analysis will be presented in a forthcoming paper.