Four Changing-Look Active Galactic Nuclei Found From Optical Variations

2024/04/15 by Zhu, Litao, Li, Jie, Wang, Zhongxiang +1 · 4 citations
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.10181

Abstract

We report the finding of four changing-look (CL) active galactic nuclei (AGN). We selected these sources due to their potential as interesting targets when considering their relatively-large optical flux variations and related mid-infrared flux variations. To identify their CL feature, we use archival spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) taken at least 8 years ago as well as spectra taken recently from the Transient Name Server (TNS) and with the 2.4-m LiJiang telescope (LJT). We study the sources' spectral changes by fitting and determining the H_α and H_β components and verify their CL behavior. When comparing the TNS and/or LJT spectra to the SDSS ones, all four sources showed the appearance of a broad or a stronger broad H_α component and a relatively weak broad H_β component. As two of the four sources are established to have a brighter-and-bluer feature in the photometric data, during the time periods in which the TNS and LJT spectra were taken, this feature likely accompanied the turn-on of the broad components. Thus, we suggest that this brighter-and-bluer feature can be used as a criterion for efficiently finding CL sources among previously spectroscopically classified type 2 AGN, such as from among the sources provided by the SDSS.

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