Optical Variability of Active Galactic Nuclei

Variability studies of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) typically use either power spectral density (PSD) and structure function (SF) analyses or direct modeling of light curves with the damped random walk (DRW) and the continuous autoregressive moving average (CARMA) models. A fair fraction of research publications on the subject are flawed, and simply report incorrect results, because they lack a deep understanding of where these methods originate from and what their limitations are. For example, SF analyses typically lack or use a wrong noise subtraction procedure, leading to flat SFs. DRW, on the other hand, can only be used if the experiment length is sufficient, at least ten times the signal decorrelation time scale τ , and if the data show the power-law SF slope of γ ≡ 0.5.