Variability in active galactic nuclei: confrontation of models with observations

The variability of active galactic nuclei (AGN) has long held the promise of shedding light on their detailed structure and possibly other astrophysical phenomena. Different emission mechanisms lead to different patterns of variability in flux, which are in principle easily distinguishable. Recent predictions for the expected spectrum of variations for various models are now in such a form that they can be compared with the observed statistical properties of AGN light curves from large-scale monitoring programmes. In this paper, we use the results of a long-term monitoring programme of a large sample of quasars and Seyfert galaxies, as well as individual light curves from the literature, to distinguish between the various model predictions. The results favour a model based on accretion disc instability over the starburst model, where the variation comes from a succession of supernova bursts, but it also appears that much of the observed variation in quasars is due to gravitational microlensing.