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Known changing-look AGN located within Rubin Deep Drilling Fields

Mariangella Camus, Swayamtrupta Panda

Abstract

Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL-AGN) exhibit spectroscopic and photometric changes on timescales of months to years, making them powerful laboratories for studying accretion variability onto supermassive black holes. Motivated by the growing relevance of large spectro-photometric time-domain surveys, especially the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), we compiled a master catalog of known CL-AGN from the literature and evaluated its spatial overlap with the Rubin survey footprint. Using a geometric cross-match based on sky coordinates, we identify 79 sources located in high-cadence regions of the main survey footprint (Wide-Fast-Deep, or WFD), including 5 particularly favorable targets lying within the Deep Drilling Fields (DDFs) of COSMOS and XMM-LSS. These sources represent especially promising candidates for future variability studies in the Rubin era. This Research Note presents a first proof of concept for connecting known CL-AGN with Rubin observing fields, while the full catalog and a more comprehensive analysis will be presented in a forthcoming paper.

Known changing-look AGN located within Rubin Deep Drilling Fields

Abstract

Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CL-AGN) exhibit spectroscopic and photometric changes on timescales of months to years, making them powerful laboratories for studying accretion variability onto supermassive black holes. Motivated by the growing relevance of large spectro-photometric time-domain surveys, especially the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), we compiled a master catalog of known CL-AGN from the literature and evaluated its spatial overlap with the Rubin survey footprint. Using a geometric cross-match based on sky coordinates, we identify 79 sources located in high-cadence regions of the main survey footprint (Wide-Fast-Deep, or WFD), including 5 particularly favorable targets lying within the Deep Drilling Fields (DDFs) of COSMOS and XMM-LSS. These sources represent especially promising candidates for future variability studies in the Rubin era. This Research Note presents a first proof of concept for connecting known CL-AGN with Rubin observing fields, while the full catalog and a more comprehensive analysis will be presented in a forthcoming paper.
Paper Structure (9 sections, 1 figure)

This paper contains 9 sections, 1 figure.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Analysis
  3. Construction of the known CL-AGN catalog
  4. Rubin material used
  5. Cross-match methodology
  6. Results and Discussions
  7. Number of catalog sources and cross-match statistics
  8. Sources in specific fields
  9. Summary and Future Work

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: All-sky map that shows the distribution of the 1,337 compiled Changing-Look AGN (CL-AGN) candidates overlaid on the footprints of major large-scale surveys. The background highlights the multi-survey synergy between the Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST (photometric coverage) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI; including DECaLS, MzLS, and allied surveys). The general CL-AGN population is shown in purple. We highlight 74 sources located in deep regions of the Rubin Wide-Fast-Deep (WFD) survey ($N \geq 804$ visits) as cyan circles. Most notably, the 5 highest-priority targets (gold stars) are strictly contained within the 1.75° Field of View (red rings) of the Rubin Deep Drilling Fields (DDFs). The bottom insets provide zoomed-in views of the target density and footprint overlap within of the target density and footprint overlap within th COSMOS (left) and XMM-LSS (right) fields.