Time Delay Evolution of Five Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

Here we investigate light curves of the continuum and emission lines of five type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGN) from our monitoring campaign, to test time-evolution of their time delays. Using both modeled and observed AGN light curves, we apply Gaussian kernel-based estimator to capture variation of local patterns of their time evolving delays. The largest variations of time delays of all objects occur in the period when continuum or emission lines luminosity is the highest. However, Gaussian kernel-based method shows instability in the case of NGC 5548, 3C 390.3, E1821 + 643 and NGC 4051 possibly due to numerical discrepancies between damped random walk (DRW) time scale of light curves and sliding time windows of the method. The temporal variations of time lags of Arp 102B can correspond to the real nature of the time lag evolution.