Friday, March 07, 2025 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills Room

John Hood , University of Chicago

"The South Pole Telescope AGN Monitoring Campaign: First Release of SPTpol Bright AGN Lightcurves"

Abstract:

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) collaboration has started a campaign to monitor active galactic nuclei (AGN) that will grow to include more than 1,000 sources. Here, we show SPT AGN light curves and data for 100+ sources that are being made publicly available for the first time. We show data from the SPTpol instrument, which was designed for observations of the CMB at angular scales of 1 arcminute and larger and ran from 2012 to 2016. These observations come from the 500- square-degree SPTpol survey field, which was covered several times a day using detectors that were sensitive to radiation in bands with centers at 90 and 150 GHz. We discuss the data processing pipeline, the matched filter process, and the source selection parameters. We also show light curves for selected sources and variability statistics for the full sample. All of the data products we show here will be available for download through the SPT Treasury Record of AGN With Historical Activity and Time Series, or STRAWHAT, catalog. This is the first step in a larger release that will include polarized AGN light curves from SPTpol data and three-band polarized light curves from the ongoing SPT-3G survey. This project will serve as a basis for monitoring AGN with current and future CMB experiments like Simons Observatory and CMB-S4, as well as multi-wavelength studies with facilities like VRO-LSST and Strobe-X

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