10.4 Active galactic nuclei

Author(s): Maria Isabel Carnerero, Claudia M. Raiteri

Gaia DR3 provides the first Gaia catalogue of variable active galactic nuclei (AGNs), which includes about 872 000 objects in table vari_agn. They were selected on the basis of the agreement of their properties with those of the QSO-like sources belonging to the Gaia Celestial Reference Frame sample (Gaia-CRF3; Gaia Collaboration et al. 2022, 2021b, see also Section 4.1 of the release documentation). For all the sources, variability properties are defined by a number of parameters, and light curves of FoV transits are supplied in the $G$, $G_{\mathrm{BP}}$, and $G_{\mathrm{RP}}$ bands. In this section, we describe the procedure that led to the definition of the variable AGNs sample and its verification and validation. More details on the selection methods and sample analysis can be found in Carnerero et al. (2023).