THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY REVERBERATION MAPPING PROJECT: RAPID C iv BROAD ABSORPTION LINE VARIABILITY

ABSTRACT We report the discovery of rapid variations of a high-velocity C iv broad absorption line trough in the quasar SDSS J141007.74+541203.3. This object was intensively observed in 2014 as a part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project, during which 32 epochs of spectrosco...

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Published in:	The Astrophysical journal 2015-06, Vol.806 (1), p.111
Main Authors:	Grier, C. J., Hall, P. B., Brandt, W. N., Trump, J. R., Shen, Yue, Vivek, M., Ak, N. Filiz, Chen, Yuguang, Dawson, K. S., Denney, K. D., Green, Paul J., Jiang, Linhua, Kochanek, C. S., McGreer, Ian D., Pâris, I., Peterson, B. M., Schneider, D. P., Tao, Charling, Wood-Vasey, W. M., Bizyaev, Dmitry, Ge, Jian, Kinemuchi, Karen, Oravetz, Daniel, Pan, Kaike, Simmons, Audrey
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	ABSORPTION SPECTROSCOPY ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY BARYONS CARBON IONS FEEDBACK GALAXIES galaxies: active galaxies: kinematics and dynamics galaxies: nuclei GALAXY NUCLEI MAPPING OSCILLATIONS QUASARS quasars: absorption lines RECOMBINATION
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Summary:	ABSTRACT We report the discovery of rapid variations of a high-velocity C iv broad absorption line trough in the quasar SDSS J141007.74+541203.3. This object was intensively observed in 2014 as a part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project, during which 32 epochs of spectroscopy were obtained with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey spectrograph. We observe significant (>4 ) variability in the equivalent width (EW) of the broad (∼4000 km s−1 wide) C iv trough on rest-frame timescales as short as 1.20 days (∼29 hr), the shortest broad absorption line variability timescale yet reported. The EW varied by ∼10% on these short timescales, and by about a factor of two over the duration of the campaign. We evaluate several potential causes of the variability, concluding that the most likely cause is a rapid response to changes in the incident ionizing continuum. If the outflow is at a radius where the recombination rate is higher than the ionization rate, the timescale of variability places a lower limit on the density of the absorbing gas of ne 3.9 × 105 cm−3. The broad absorption line variability characteristics of this quasar are consistent with those observed in previous studies of quasars, indicating that such short-term variability may in fact be common and thus can be used to learn about outflow characteristics and contributions to quasar/host-galaxy feedback scenarios.
ISSN:	0004-637X 1538-4357 1538-4357