A New Approach for Measuring Power Spectra and Reconstructing Time Series in Active Galactic Nuclei [IMA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07958


We provide a new approach to measure power spectra and reconstruct time series in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) based on the fact that the Fourier transform of AGN stochastic variations is a series of complex Gaussian random variables. The approach parameterizes a stochastic series in frequency domain and transforms it back to time domain to fit the observed data. The parameters and their uncertainties are derived in a Bayesian framework, which also allows us to compare the relative merits of different power spectral density models. The well-developed fast Fourier transform algorithm together with parallel computation enable an acceptable time complexity for the approach.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Y. Li and J. Wang
Fri, 23 Feb 18
46/64

Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures; accepted to MNRAS Letter; software available at this https URL