this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Astronomy

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

The article links to the "damped random walk" paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.3966.pdf I had the same question after reading a related article in an earlier thread: https://mander.xyz/post/984213 - wtf do quasars have to do with measuring the rate of flow of time? - but it seems by simply treating the luminosity graph of a quasar over several years as a random walk with some power spectrum (instead of trying to model the turbulence of the accretion disk directly) they were able to pull out best-fit parameters out of the random walk that also happen to be correlated with other physical properties.