Examining AGN UV/Optical Variability beyond the Simple Damped Random Walk

Abstract We present damped harmonic oscillator (DHO) light-curve modeling for a sample of 12,714 spectroscopically confirmed quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82 region. DHO is a second-order continuous-time autoregressive moving-average process, which can be fully described using four independent parameters: a natural oscillation frequency ( ω 0 ), a damping ratio ( ξ ), a characteristic perturbation timescale ( τ perturb ), and an amplitude for the perturbing white noise ( σ ϵ ). The asymptotic variability amplitude of a DHO process is quantified by σ DHO —a function of ω 0 , ξ , τ perturb , and σ ϵ . We find that both τ perturb and σ ϵ follow different dependencies with rest-frame wavelength ( λ RF ) on either side of 2500 Å, whereas σ DHO follows a single power-law relation with λ RF . After correcting for wavelength dependence, σ DHO exhibits anticorrelations with both the Eddington ratio and the black hole mass, while τ perturb —with a typical value of days in the rest frame—shows an anticorrelation with the bolometric luminosity. Modeling active galactic nuclei (AGN) variability as a DHO offers more insight into the workings of accretion disks close to the supermassive black holes at the center of AGN. The newly discovered short-term variability (characterized by τ perturb and σ ϵ ) and its correlation with bolometric luminosity pave the way for new algorithms that will derive fundamental properties (e.g., Eddington ratio) of AGN using photometric data alone.