The nature of flux variations in the continua and broad-line regions of selected active galactic nuclei

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present a multifractal analysis of the long-term light curves of a small sample of type 1 active galactic nuclei: NGC 4151, Arp 102B, 3C 390.3, E1821+643 and NGC 7469. We aim to investigate how the degrees of multifractality of the continuum and Hβ line vary among the five different objects and to check whether the multifractal behaviours of the continuum and the Hβ line correlate with standard accretion parameters. The backward (θ  = 0) one-dimensional multifractal detrended moving average procedure was applied to light curves covering the full observation period and partial observation periods containing an equal number of epochs for each object. We detected multifractal signatures for the continua of NGC 4151, Arp 102B and 3C 390.3 and for the Hβ lines of NGC 4151 and 3C 390.3. However, we found nearly monofractal signatures for the continua of E1821+643 and NGC 7469, as well as for the Hβ lines of Arp 102B, E1821+643 and NGC 7469. In addition, we did not find any correlations between the degree of multifractality of the Hβ line and accretion parameters, while the degree of multifractality of the continuum seems to correlate with the Eddington ratio (i.e. the smaller the ratio is, the stronger the degree of multifractality). The given method is not robust, and these results should be taken with caution. Future analysis of the sampling rate and other properties of the light curves should help with better constraining and understanding these results.