Orbital signatures from observed light curves of blazars

Abstract

Variability in active galactic nuclei is observed in ultraviolet to X-ray emission based light curves. This could be attributed to orbital signatures of the plasma that constitutes the accretion flow on the putative disk or in the developing jet close to the inner region of the central black hole. We discuss some theoretical models which build on this view. These models include general relativistic effects such as light bending, aberration effects, gravitational and Doppler redshifts. The novel aspects relate to the treatment of helical flow in cylindrical and conical geometries in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild black hole that leads to amplitude and frequency modulations of simulated light curves as well as the inclusion of beaming effects in these idealized geometries. We then present a suite of time series analysis techniques applicable to data with varied properties which can extract detailed information from them for their use in theoretical models.