TALES doctoral candidate Michail Polioudakis contributed to a scientific paper accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, presenting AGILE (AGN in the LSST Era), a new simulation pipeline designed to model how active galactic nuclei (AGN), galaxies, and stars will appear in the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

AGILE generates realistic mock catalogs of astronomical sources and simulates their variability over time, ultimately producing synthetic observations that closely resemble those expected from LSST. This allows researchers to test and refine methods for identifying and studying AGN in the vast datasets that LSST will deliver.

Figure Caption: Example light curves of bright AGNs simulated with AGILE in the LSST photometric bands. The colored points show how these objects would be observed by LSST over time, while the solid lines represent the underlying truth catalog light curves. The right panels show the light curves in the r-band for four individual AGNs. The intrinsic variability is modeled using a damped random walk process, which generates the underlying truth catalog light curves, while the sampled points reflect realistic observations according to the LSST first 3 year baseline.

Michail’s contribution focused on validating the simulated AGN population, improving the description of model parameters, and testing the variability prescriptions used in the pipeline. By strengthening the reliability of these simulations, this work helps to initiate future studies that will use variability as a powerful tool to analyze the millions of AGN expected to be discovered in the LSST era.