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From Tantrums to Transformations: AGN Transients Discovered with ZTF

Presentation #109.05D in the session “AGN and Quasars 1”.

Published onJan 11, 2021
From Tantrums to Transformations: AGN Transients Discovered with ZTF

This dissertation work consists of searches for extreme AGN-related outbursts during Phase I of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey, which has been a ground-breaking wide-field instrument for the real-time detection and rapid follow-up of transients in the Northern Sky.

Our dedicated study of nuclear transients hosted by AGN in the ZTF alerts stream, together with spectroscopic and high-energy follow-up observations, led to surprising new avenues for study, including 1) the establishment of a new observational class of quiescent galaxies caught turning into quasars, 2) the discovery of a preponderance of smooth and high-amplitude optical transients hosted in NLSy1s, and 3) a framework for distinguishing extreme AGN variability from other transients in AGN. We present the results of these observations, including candidates for TDEs in AGN, changing-look AGN caught “turning-on”, as well as members of the new emerging observational class of flares in Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 (NLSy1) galaxies associated with enhanced accretion (Trakhtenbrot et al. 2019). We compared the properties of these samples of flares to previously reported changing-look quasars and Seyfert galaxies, confirmed that they are a unique observational class of transients related to physical processes associated with the host galaxy’s accretion state. and considered the observations in the context of the physical interpretations for a range of related transients from the literature. With these unique sample sets, we also aim to understand why we have found certain galaxy types to preferentially host the sites of such rapid enhanced flaring activity, and attempt to map out the innermost environment of the accretion events. These pathfinding studies enabled with ZTF have the potential to guide how these exceptional moments of AGN evolution will be systematically discovered in future large area surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

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