Characterizing Some Gaia Alerts with LAMOST and SDSS
  Gaia is regularly producing Alerts on objects where photometric variability
has been detected. The physical nature of these objects has often to be
determined with the complementary observations from ground-based facilities. We
have compared the list of Gaia Alerts (until 20181101) with archival LAMOST and
SDSS spectroscopic data. The date of the ground-based observation rarely
corresponds to the date of the Alert, but this allows at least the
identification of the source if it is persistent, or the host galaxy if the
object was only transient like a supernova. A list of Gaia Nuclear Transients
from Kostrzewa-Rutkowska et al. (2018) has been included in this search also.
We found 26 Gaia Alerts with spectra in LAMOST+SDSS labelled as stars (12 with
multi-epoch spectra). A majority of them are CVs. Similarly 206 Gaia Alerts
have associated spectra labelled as galaxies (49 with multi-epoch spectra).
Those spectra were generally obtained on a date different from the Alert date,
are mostly emission-line galaxies, leading to the suspicion that most of the
Alerts were due to a SN. As for the GNT list, we found 55 associated spectra
labelled as galaxies (13 with multi-epoch spectra). In two galaxies, Gaia17aal
and GNTJ170213+2543, was the date of the spectroscopic observation close enough
to the Alert date: we find a trace of the SN itself in their LAMOST spectrum,
both classified here as a type Ia SN. The GNT sample has a higher proportion of
AGNs, suggesting that some of the detected variations are also due to the AGN
itself. Similar for Quasars, we found 30 Gaia Alerts but 68 GNT cases have
single epoch quasar spectra, while 12 plus 23 have multi-epoch spectra. For ten
out of these 35, their multi-epoch spectra show appearance or disappearance of
the broad Balmer lines and also variations in the continuum, qualifying them as
"Changing Look Quasars".
