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R. R. Valença

Publications and source records attributed to R. R. Valença.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

CLAS+: A large catalog of Changing-Look AGN candidates selected through S-PLUS narrow-band photometry

Changing-look active galactic nuclei (CLAGN) exhibit rapid spectral transitions on timescales of months to years, challenging standard AGN unification models and providing unique insight into accretion-disk variability and obscuration processes. Despite their scientific importance, systematic searches for CLAGN remain limited by the scarcity of multi-epoch spectroscopy and the difficulty of constructing large samples efficiently. We introduce CLAS+, a catalog constructed by comparing synthetic photometry derived from DESI DR1 and SDSS DR17 spectra with contemporaneous narrow-band imaging from the S-PLUS survey. Applying our pipeline to a parent sample of 98,139 quasars, we select high-confidence CLAGN candidates above a threshold of reduced chi-squared $χ_r^2 > 15$. We identify 3,554 strong CLAGN candidates, corresponding to 3.6\% of the parent sample. This selected fraction is conditional on the adopted criterion and should not be interpreted as an intrinsic CLAGN occurrence rate. Cross-matching with existing CLAGN compilations shows that CLAS+ identifies a large population of previously unreported high-priority candidates (3,481). Among the spectroscopic--photometric comparisons with reliable temporal classification, 40\% are classified as photometric turn-on, 41\% as intermediate, and 19\% as turn-off. We also find an apparent redshift dependence in the relative fractions, with photometric turn-on candidates becoming more common at higher redshifts within the CLAS+ selected sample. Therefore, narrow-band photometry provides a powerful and efficient alternative to purely spectroscopic searches for identifying CLAGN candidates at scale. CLAS+ substantially expands the known CLAGN candidate population and provides a valuable target list for future spectroscopic follow-up and time-domain studies with facilities such as Rubin/LSST.

astro-ph.GA↗

The Quasar Catalogue for S-PLUS DR4 (QuCatS) and the estimation of photometric redshifts

The advent of massive broad-band photometric surveys enabled photometric redshift estimates for unprecedented numbers of galaxies and quasars. These estimates can be improved using better algorithms or by obtaining complementary data such as narrow-band photometry, and broad-band photometry over an extended wavelength range. We investigate the impact of both approaches on photometric redshifts for quasars using data from Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey (S-PLUS) DR4, Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) DR6/7, and the unWISE catalog for the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in three machine learning methods: Random Forest, Flexible Conditional Density Estimation (FlexCoDE), and Bayesian Mixture Density Network (BMDN). Including narrow-band photometry improves the root-mean-square error by 11% in comparison to a model trained with only broad-band photometry. Narrow-band information only provided an improvement of 3.8% when GALEX and WISE colours were included. Thus narrow bands play a more important role for objects that do not have GALEX or WISE counterparts, which respectively makes 92% and 25% of S-PLUS data considered here. Nevertheless, the inclusion of narrow-band information provided better estimates of the probability density functions obtained with FlexCoDE and BMDN. We publicly release a value-added catalogue of photometrically selected quasars with the photo-z predictions from all methods studied here. The catalogue provided with this work covers the S-PLUS DR4 area (~3000deg$^2$), containing 645 980, 244 912, 144 991 sources with the probability of being a quasar higher than, 80%, 90%, 95% up to r < 21.3 and good photometry quality in the detection image. More quasar candidates can be retrieved from the S-PLUS data base by considering less restrictive selection criteria.

astro-ph.CO↗