[vsnet-alert 11044] re QSO B3 0307+380 outburst

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Kato Taichi commented :-

"Catalina detected an outburst of the QSO (z=0.816) B3 0307+380.
The light curve is rather unusual with dwarf nova-like outbursts."

Well, the currently bright outburst is certainly marked, but the other stuff looks not untypical.

I stared at a lot of agn/qso lightcurves from the Stripe 82 data a coupla month back and they're often like this, one to two mags amplitude, variability on all scales, some looking to be longterm trends but with tens of days quasicyclic variations superposed, and the css lightcurve here looks like a bunch of snapshots of this sort of thing.  Easiest way to collect a ton for comparison is to cross the fifth edition of the sdss qso catalogue with the stripe82 epoch photometry via casjobs.

The current bright state for this object is a bit nonstandard though, more OVVish.

Cheers

John

NEDness :-

<http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi-bin/nph-objsearch?search_type=Near+Position+Search&in_csys=Equatorial&lon=03+10+49.96&lat=+38+14+53.5&radius=1>