Optical Variability of Gaia CRF3 Sources with Robust Statistics and the 5000 Most Variable Quasars

Abstract

Using the light-curve time-series data for more than 11.7 million variable sources published in the Gaia Data Release 3, the average magnitudes, colors, and variability parameters have been computed for 0.836 million Gaia CRF objects, which are mostly quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGNs). To mitigate the effects of occasional flukes in the data, robust statistical measures have been employed: namely, the median, median absolute deviation, and Spearman correlation. We find that the majority of the CRF sources have moderate amplitudes of variability in the Gaia G band just below 0.1 mag. The heavy-tailed distribution of variability amplitudes (quantified as robust standard deviations) does not find a single analytical form, but is closer to Maxwell distribution with a scale of 0.078 mag. The majority of CRF sources have positive correlations between G magnitude and GBP−GRP colors, meaning that these quasars and AGNs become bluer when they are brighter. The variations in the GBP and GRP bands are also mostly positively correlated. Dependencies of all variability parameters with cosmological redshift are fairly flat for the more accurate estimates above redshift 0.7, while the median color shows strong systematic variations with redshift. Using a robust normalized score of magnitude deviations, a sample of the 5000 most variable quasars is selected and published. The intersection of this sample with the ICRF3 catalog shows a much higher rate of strongly variable quasars (mostly blazars) in ICRF3.