Changing-look Active Galactic Nuclei. I. Tracking the Transition on the Main Sequence of Quasars

Abstract

This paper is the first in a series of papers that prepare and analyze spectral and other properties for a database of already-discovered changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL AGNs). Here we focus on the spectral fitting and analysis of broad emission lines in a sample of 93 CL AGNs collected from the literature with existing Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)/Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)/extended-BOSS spectroscopy where the H β emission-line profile does not completely disappear in any epochs. Additionally, we have gathered older/newer spectral epochs from all the available SDSS data releases to make the database more complete. We use PyQSOFit and perform a homogeneous spectral decomposition of all of our SDSS spectra and tabulate the AGN continuum and emission-line properties per epoch per source, chronologically. This further allows us to categorize the sources in our sample as Turn-On or Turn-Off and subsequently check for repeated occurrences of such phases. We then estimate the black hole mass ( M _BH ) and the Eddington ratio ( λ _Edd ) per epoch per source where the required parameters are available and well estimated. We demonstrate the movement of the source in the M _BH – λ _Edd plane, allowing us to check for systematic changes in the source’s fundamental properties. We then track their transition along the optical plane of the Eigenvector 1 schema and categorize sources that either stay within the same population (A or B) or make an interpopulation movement as a function of spectral epoch. We also test the Balmer decrement (H α /H β ) of a subset of our sample of CL AGNs as a function of time and AGN luminosity.

Keywords

• Quasars
• Active galactic nuclei
• Spectroscopy
• Catalogs
• Supermassive black holes