Research in Astron. Astrophys. 2011 Vol . 11 No. 11, 1311–1316 Research in http://www.raa-journal.org http://www.iop.org/journals/raa Astronomy and Astrophysics Rapid variability in S5 0716+714 ∗ Jun-Hui Fan1,2,JunTao3,4, Bo-Chen Qian3,4,YiLiu1,2, Jiang-He Yang5, Fei-Peng Pi1,2 and Wei Xu1,2 1 Center for Astrophysics, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou 510006, China; jhfan−
[email protected] 2 Astronomy Science and Technology Research Laboratory of Department of Education of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou 510006, China 3 Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200030, China 4 Joint Institute for Galaxies and Cosmology, Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and University of Science and Technology of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200030, China 5 Department of Physics and Electronics Science, Hunan University of Arts and Science, Changde 415000, China Received 2011 April 6; accepted 2011 August 27 Abstract S5 0716+714 is one of the targets in our long term blazar monitor- ing program carried out with the 1.56-m telescope at Sheshan Station of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, China. We report a very rapid variability of ΔI =0.611± 0.102 mag over 3.6 min detected in our monitoring program during the period from December 2000 to March 2007. The rapid variability suggests that the mass for the central black hole is log(M/M)=7.68 − 8.38. Key words: galaxies: active-BL Lacertae objects: general-galaxies: jets 1 INTRODUCTION Blazars consisting of BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects and flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) are an extreme subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGNs).