Wednesday

Transients and variability in the centres of galaxies offer unique probes of supermassive black holes, accretion processes, dense stellar populations and more. While time domain surveys are finding exciting new sources like tidal disruption events, embedded supernovae and possibly even compact object mergers in AGN disks, picking the most interesting objects out of the alert streams can be very time-consuming due to the numerous alerts generated by more typical AGN variability. Yet by eye it is not too hard to distinguish e.g. stochastic AGN variability from smooth, large amplitude flares. I would like to discuss whether Citizen Science could be an effective tool for classifying large numbers of nuclear alerts from current surveys like ZTF / ATLAS, and in future LSST, and providing a training set to inform automated filtering for TDEs, nuclear SNe, changing look AGN, and other phenomena.