Flickering black holes

类星体是宇宙中最明亮的物体，由超大质量黑洞的吸积提供能量。类星体的一个关键特征是它们的极端可变性，这提供了一种识别这些罕见物体的方法（给定足够质量的数据）。这个项目的目的是在一片独特的天空中识别类星体（超深调查），使用非常深的红外成像，拍摄了前所未有的10年基线。这将是同类研究中的第一次，它将为遥远宇宙中类星体的活动提供一个全新的、完全独立的普查。我们希望能发现几千个新的类星体，让我们能够测量早期黑洞的成长。通过探测其他方法无法解决的物理尺度，光曲线也将为类星体的燃料和吸积模型提供新的测试。作为奖励，我们还将在该领域的约25万个正常星系中识别超新星，为遥远星系中超新星活动的普遍性提供新的统计研究。

Quasars are the most luminous objects in the Universe, powered by accretion onto supermassive black holes. A key characteristic of quasars is their extreme variability, which provides a means of identifying these rare objects (given data of sufficient quality). The aim of this project is to identify quasars in a unique patch of sky (the Ultra Deep Survey), using very deep infrared imaging taken over an unprecedented baseline of 10 years. This would be the first study of its kind, which will provide a new and entirely independent census of quasar activity in the distant Universe. We expect to identify several thousand new quasars, allowing us to measure the growth of black holes at early times. By probing physical scales that are unresolvable by other means, the light curves will also provide new tests for models of quasar fuelling and accretion. As a bonus, we will also identify supernovae among the ~250,000 normal galaxies in the field, to provide a new statistical study of the prevalence of supernova activity in distant galaxies.