A search for optical AGN variability in 35,000 low-mass galaxies with the Palomar Transient Factory

Understand

We present an analysis of the long-term optical variability for $\sim50,000$ nearby (z<0.055) galaxies from the NASA-Sloan Atlas, $35,000$ of which are low-mass ($M_{\ast}<10^{10}~M_{\odot}$).

• We use difference imaging of Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) R-band observations to construct light curves with typical baselines of several years.
• We then search for subtle variations in the nuclear light output.
• We determine whether detected variability is AGN-like by assessing the fit quality to a damped random walk model.