Re-Analysis of QPO in 3C 273 Light Curve

Abstract

We have developed analysis tools to search for quasi periodic oscillations in light curves from active galactic nuclei, using the following time series techniques: Wavelets, periodogram, Lomb–Scargle periodogram, structure function and multi-harmonic analysis of variance. The analysis tools incorporate different noise models with significant levels for all the techniques that is an improvement over the previous work. By looking for consistently high significance, we make the detection of periodicities more robust. We apply this tool to a previously reported QPO (Espaillat et al. 2008) in the X-ray light curve of 3C 273 with a periodicity of ~3300 s and find that the significance is only 74% in the wavelet and fails to show up above 95% significance in the periodogram and multi-harmonic analysis of variance.