The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Rapid CIV Broad Absorption Line Variability

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We report the discovery of rapid variations of a high-velocity CIV 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 (>4sigma) variability in the equivalent width of the broad (~4000 km/s wide) CIV trough on rest-frame timescales as short as 1.20 days (~29 hours), the shortest broad absorption line variability timescale yet reported.
• The equivalent width varied by ~10% on these short timescales, and by about a factor of two over the duration of the campaign.