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Description
Upcoming large area sky surveys like Euclid and eROSITA, which are dedicated to studying the role of dark energy in the expansion history of the Universe and the three-dimensional mass distribution of matter, crucially depend on accurate photometric redshifts. The identification of variable sources, such as active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and the achievable redshift accuracy for varying objects are important in view of the science goals of the Euclid and eROSITA missions. We probe AGN optical variability for a large sample of X-ray-selected AGNs in the XMM-COSMOS field, using the multi-epoch light curves provided by the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) 3n and Medium Deep Field surveys. To quantify variability we employed a simple statistic to estimate the probability of variability and the normalized excess variance to measure the variability amplitude. Utilizing these two variability parameters, we defined a sample of varying AGNs for every PS1 band. We investigated the influence of variability on the calculation of photometric redshifts by applying three different input photometry sets for our fitting procedure. For each of the five PS1 bands g_P1_, r_P1_, i_P1_, z_P1_, and y_P1_, we chose either the epochs minimizing the interval in observing time, the median magnitude values, or randomly drawn light curve points to compute the redshift. In addition, we derived photometric redshifts using PS1 photometry extended by GALEX/IRAC bands.
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