THE LONG-TERM X-RAY VARIABILITY OF BROAD ABSORPTION LINE QUASARS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We analyze the long-term (rest-frame 3–30 yr) X-ray variability of 11 broad absorption line (BAL) quasars, mainly to constrain the variation properties of the X-ray absorbing shielding gas that is thought to play a critical role in BAL wind launching. Our BAL quasar sample has coverage with multiple X-ray observatories including Chandra , XMM-Newton , BeppoSAX , ASCA , ROSAT , and Einstein ; 3–11 observations are available for each source. For seven of the eleven sources we have obtained and analyzed new Chandra observations suitable for searching for any strong X-ray variability. We find highly significant X-ray variability in three sources (PG 1001+054, PG 1004+130, and PG 2112+059). The maximum observed amplitude of the 2–8 keV variability is a factor of 3.8 ± 1.3, 1.5 ± 0.2, and 9.9 ± 2.3 for PG 1001+054, PG 1004+130, and PG 2112+059, respectively, and these sources show detectable variability on rest-frame timescales down to 5.8, 1.4, and 0.5 yr. For PG 1004+130 and PG 2112+059 we also find significant X-ray spectral variability associated with the flux variability. Considering our sample as a whole, we do not find that BAL quasars exhibit exceptional long-term X-ray variability when compared to the quasar population in general. We do not find evidence for common strong changes in the shielding gas owing to physical rearrangement or accretion-disk rotation, although some changes are found; this has implications for modeling observed ultraviolet BAL variability. Finally, we report for the first time an X-ray detection of the highly polarized and well-studied BAL quasar IRAS 14026+4341 in its new Chandra observation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".