The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), aiming to begin in early 2025, will allow studies of the growing supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) on a truly massive scale. After a brief review of the LSST from an AGN perspective, I will describe the planned selection of tens of millions of AGNs using the LSST plus multiwavelength data,...
The Zwicky Transient Factory (ZTF) has been surveying the visible sky above Dec = -30 on a 2-3 night cadence in $g$, $r$, and $I$ for the past five years. With a $5 \sigma$ detection limit of $g = 20.5$, this provides hundreds of thousands of nightly real-time public alerts as well as well-sampled light curves for over 3 billion sources. This is an unparalleled data set for both anomaly...
The third release of Gaia data, published on June 13, 2022, includes not only astrometric and astrophysical parameters of different types of sources, but also several catalogues of variable sources. Among these, the catalogue of Gaia variable AGN, which is described by Carnerero et al. (2022). To identify the variable AGN, we analyzed the light curves of more than 80 million sources observed...
With about 380 refereed papers published each year, XMM-Newton is one of the most
successful scientific missions of ESA ever. Observation of AGNs and their variability is one of the main research fields covered by the observing program of the mission. The talk highlights XMM-Newton contributions to our current view of Black Holes variability. XMM-Newton observations provide a unique...
The La Silla QUEST (LSQ) supernova survey ran for 6 years on the ESO 1m Schmidt telescope at La Silla Chile, using a large CCD array to replace the photographic plate of the Schmidt. The survey imaged ~1000 degrees twice per night using a single broad V band filter, covering a total area of ~25,000 square degrees from declination ~ -80 to +25 degrees. The survey magnitude limit is V~21 in a...
eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array), the core instrument on the Russian-German Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) mission has completed 4 scans of the entire sky with unprecedented sensitivity in the 0.2-8 keV energy range. I will present an overview of the instrument capabilities, the current status of the mission, a few selected early science results focusing on the...
The eROSITA all-sky X-ray survey has provided the basis for a large-scale search for extreme X-ray variability in extragalactic objects associated with accretion changes in AGN. We have combined the survey dataset with a multi-wavelength follow-up campaign of the most variable objects. The follow-up observations include optical spectroscopy and X-ray and UV observations. This presentation will...
Recent years have seen broad observational support for the
circumnuclear gas around supermassive black holes to contain a clumpy
component. In the X-ray band, individual clouds can manifest
themselves when they transit the line of sight to the X-ray corona,
temporarily obscuring the X-ray continuum, and indicating the
characteristics and location of these clouds.
The eROSITA X-ray telescope...
The eROSITA all-sky surveys (eRASS) continuously scan the sky
along great circles crossing the ecliptic poles. This scanning strategy
covers the full sky every six months and visits the ecliptic poles every
four hours, leading to much longer exposure time and much higher cadence
at the ecliptic poles than the majority of the sky. Between Dec. 2019
and Feb. 2022, the eRASS surveys scanned...
The Survey and Time-domain Astrophysical Research eXplorer (STAR-X;
http://star-x.xraydeep.org) is a Medium Explorer class mission
recently selected for a competitive NASA Phase A study. It comprises a
wide-field, high-throughput, high-angular-resolution X-ray Telescope
(XRT) and a complementary UV Telescope (UVT) on an agile spacecraft
bus. STAR-X will conduct high-cadence, deep-and-wide...
