Selecting Quasars by their Intrinsic Variability

Details Selecting Quasars by their Intrinsic Variability Selecting Quasars by their Intrinsic Variability

2010-02-12

arxiv.org/abs/1002.2642v3

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

16 pages, 9 color figures and 5 tables - v3: Equations corrected and text updated (see Erratum for details of corrections). Er

Scientific paper

We present a new and simple technique for selecting extensive, complete and pure quasar samples, based on their intrinsic variability. We parametrize the single-band variability by a power-law model for the light-curve structure function, with amplitude A and power-law index gamma. We show that quasars can be efficiently separated from other non-variable and variable sources by the location of the individual sources in the A-gamma plane. We use ~60 epochs of imaging data, taken over ~5 years, from the SDSS stripe 82 (S82) survey, where extensive spectroscopy provides a reference sample of quasars, to demonstrate the power of variability as a quasar classifier in multi-epoch surveys. For UV-excess selected objects, variability performs just as well as the standard SDSS color selection, identifying quasars with a completeness of 90% and a purity of 95%. In the redshift range 2.5

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