Optical variability of faint quasars

Details Optical variability of faint quasars Optical variability of faint quasars

Jul 1993

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993mnras.263..236c&link_type=abstract

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (ISSN 0035-8711), vol. 263, no. 1, p. 236-246.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

20

Faint Objects, Quasars, Red Shift, Stellar Color, Variable Stars, Astronomical Photometry, Color-Color Diagram, Sky Surveys (Astronomy), Variability

Scientific paper

The variability properties of a quasar sample, spectroscopically complete to magnitude J = 22.0, are investigated on a time baseline of 2 yr, using three different photometric bands (U, J and F). The original sample was obtained using a combination of different selection criteria: colors, slitless spectroscopy, and variability, based on a time baseline of 1 yr. The main goals of this work are two-fold: first, to derive the percentage of variable quasars on a relatively short time baseline; secondly, to search for new quasar candidates, missed by the other selection criteria, and thus to estimate the completeness of the spectroscopic sample. In order to achieve these goals, we have extracted all the candidate variable objects from a sample of about 1800 stellar or quasi-stellar objects with limiting magnitude J = 22.50 over an area of about 0.50 sq deg. We find that more than about 65 per cent of all the objects selected as possibly variable are either confirmed quasars or quasar candidates, on the basis of their colors. It is estimated that the incompleteness of the original spectroscopic sample is less than about 12 per cent. We conclude that variability analysis of data with small photometric errors can be successfully used as an efficient and independent (or at least auxiliary) selection method in quasar surveys, even when the time baseline is relatively short.

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